


The Silence of the Master

by LittleDesertFlower



Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Character Interpretation, Alternate Universe, Canon Compliant, Discussion of Death, Episode: s04e17-e18 The End of Time, Episode: s08e11 Dark Water, Frenemies, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 08, Soul-Searching, Undisclosed characters, is it platonic is it romantic do I even know what it is?, mild pining, with series 3-4 (mostly), with series 8 onwards (in Master related aspects)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25611661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: A story about what happens when the source of evil is fading and all that remains is a person and a choice, history between old friends and old enemies, and Time Lord nature.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & The Master (Simm), Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm)
Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1908595
Comments: 15
Kudos: 27





	1. Prologue—Old Friend

**Author's Note:**

> First half of Prologue and Don't Make a Phoenix out of Me (first chapters) use canon dialogue from _The End of Time_ , from then on it’s a free fall (with plenty of DW refs!)
> 
> (As canon, I’ve mostly used the DW 2005- episodes, and also assorted info on the wiki about monsters, Earth history and Time War events that I’ve leisurely modified to fit what I wanted to write.)
> 
> **[Mentions of spoilers from Series 2, Series 4, Series 5 and Series 8.]**

_“Wait!” he calls._

_The Doctor turns around. He always turns around at the sound of that voice, even if deep down he knows why he shouldn’t. There’s talk around Gallifrey of ships falling, of skies in some planets going dark out of turn, of metal swarms advancing in the universe. When the moment comes and it all enters their atmosphere, every Time Lord will have to make their own choices. But the Doctor just… turns around._

_“Take the gun,” he says._

_It’s the not the first time he has. It won’t be the last._

_A couple of dust-kicking strides and they’re face to face. “Just take it.”_

_The Doctor looks at him and says nothing. He already has tried to, many, many times. His words always fade in the wind._ Warriors should carry weapons, _he would hear in return._

I don’t intend to ever be one, _the Doctor thinks now. He’d never be able to escape that life._

_So the Doctor just looks at him. Friends for longer than any of them remember. Sitting at the border of friendship for longer than they want to pay attention to. Face to face, and those changing eyes still pierce more than just his own. They make his knees tremble._

_“Please,” the Master says slowly. “Take the goddamn gun. Forget your own arbitrary rules. And win, if not for you, for us.”_

_Those words make the Doctor’s hands shake when he reaches out for the weapon with long, thin fingers._

* * *

Space makes things noisy. Too much so, sometimes. Everywhere in a ship, there is an engine that whispers buzzing notes to an ear; the tap of a pipe against a metal wall in a non-rhythmical manner; or the living sounds that come with crew cohabitation. Sometimes, looking out into outer space and its absolute silence should be enough to grant peace of mind, but it hardly ever is. Especially if there’s humans in that crew.

The Doctor has learned their buoyant social ways, made habits out of them, but it’s the gentle, desperate need for socialization during moments like this that throws him off guard, reminds him of what he is. The alien that sits among humans, the alien that lets them think he’s one of them, because somehow that’s kinder than the truth.

Today that truth scratches at the metal of the ship and the hearts of the Doctor. It scratches at Wilfred, who rubs at his short fingernails and stares at his feet.

“You said you were told ‘he will knock four times’… and then you die.” His voice comes up small at first, then it grows, when Wilfred himself weaves thoughts inside his head that he thinks make more sense the faster they’re interwoven. “Well, that’s him, isn’t it? The Master. That noise in his head? The Master’s going to kill you.”

It’s human, after all, to speak louder the more confident you are.

The Doctor stares at the nothingness of the universe before the two of them. Out there, the vacuum will kill anything that trespasses the wrong barriers. No sound. No breath. Funny, that something _so much bigger_ than an infinite vacuum is waiting for him down on Earth, with a perfect loop inside his head. Waiting for the final flourish, the one that they have probably been sailing toward since they first stood side by side, face to face, and saw only clear eyes in each other. Not madness, not fear.

“Yeah,” he very quietly, very sadly, concedes.

“Then kill him first.”

Wilfred offers him the handle of the gun, his eyes stone cold, dead serious. Those eyes…they’re demanding of him what no other human ever has. _It’s high time you put yourself first, Doctor. Not anyone else. Not Earth and your enemy, and then you._

The Doctor manages to tip up the corners of his lips for a second, just one.

“And that’s how the Master started.”

* * *

_It had always been the planet of brown and orange dust, shining in the light of giant binary stars. Now, the fire had turned it all red. Red, falling Gallifrey. Always fighting, always falling. Never fallen._

_One still walks its streets, still shoots up at the skies, plagued with the enemy. One still seeks to see the day when red is only the color of the grass. One that is not old yet but that will soon be._

_He faces the impossible in impossible twisted orders because such are the laws of time by which he abides. And yet… the worst enemy is the one in front of him. The enemy he has to look in the eye, face-to-face, time after time. An old friend who keeps trying to meddle for the worst, his eyes changing, glistening with more and more evil every time a Dalek ship crashes against the domes._

_“What do you intend to do with that?” the Master asks him, head nodding at the one gun that has won whatever battles the Doctor has at his back._

_“What I have to!” His voice is coarse when he answers. What ever made it so? Ash and time. Silence. “No less.”_

_All of time and all of space, to come to this. To the moment when the Doctor raises a trembling hand to point that gun at his old friend, at his old enemy. And sees him laugh._

_The Master snorts with a smirk. “You never could. Not_ you _.”_

_“I will do it. I will kill you if you stand in my way. I have to do it, I have to end this.”_

_Another snort follows, and it is clear the Master doesn’t think that requires another retort, because he just turns his back on him and tries to walk away. The Doctor doesn’t lower his gun. The Doctor just looks at him._

_“This… I do without choice,” he mutters._

_The echo of the gun will haunt him forever._

_The Master falls, like the Dalek ships, against the red dust of Gallifrey and the ashes of its children—and he just keeps on laughing._

* * *

His lip quivers, but one of his never-spoken rules prevails, and the tears are never shed.

“Sometimes I think a Time Lord lives too long.”

Wilfred’s hands fumble with the gun, while his mind fumbles over the Doctor’s words.

Grief. Anger. Pain. All that the Doctor is feeling, he’s already felt before. And what for? He knows how this story ends, how most do. How his will, eventually, either because it’s been foretold or because all stories must. And this is how he chooses, right now, to let it end.

Wilfred offers the gun again. And the Doctor’s face is a grimace of emotions that are too much to be just human. The purest expression of old age, of time. Of a voice that is breaking and the conscience behind it, forcing it not to.

“I can’t. I just can’t,” the Doctor mutters in apology. For another rule no one understands. For a choice he can’t explain.

Wilfred looks back down at his shoes, his hand catching on the handle of the gun.

“If the Master dies, what happens to all the people?”

The Doctor traps his lips together for a second.

“I don’t know,” he just says.

“Doctor, what happens?” Wilfred insists.

The Doctor exhales lengthily, weighing options that shouldn’t need to be weighed. Below him, in this vacuum of space, is the Earth he loves and has saved so many times that people usually end up forgetting when and how he was there rescuing it. And he’s withholding the truth from Wilfred because he can’t stand thinking about it, the alternative. The alternative where humans cease to deserve a safe planet just because the Doctor has made his choice.

“The template snaps,” he answers.

Wilfred’s eyes open wide.

“What? They go back to being human? They’re alive, and human?” Wilfred stares right at the Doctor, unforgiving. He knows, and he understands. This is the scenario in which the good thing happens because the right person makes the right choice. Exactly the opposite of what the Doctor is thinking. “Then don’t you dare, sir. Don’t you dare put _him_ before them. Now, you take this.” This time, Wilfred slips the cold deadly metal into the Doctor’s hand and wraps his own fingers around it, giving him both the weapon and his command. “That’s an order, Doctor. Take the gun. You take the gun and save your life.”

But it’s not himself that he’s saving first. His own life is still not the priority. It’s never been.


	2. Don’t Make a Phoenix out of Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired very much by the foreheads touching scene in _The End of Time_. And YouTube fanvids (anything with the Master and the Doctor in the title, I watch and weep to).

Gallifrey, soon to knock the Earth out of the sky. Like a golf club, hitting the ball far and fast. The Master was going to take it and mold it, put it in a cage to never look at it again only so that the Doctor wasn’t able to. But at least it would have been _safe_ , then.

Now, a Nuclear Bolt is malfunctioning violently at the traction of a whole planet nearing and a whole planet being pulled away in its turn. And an old man has just gone inside it to save another, without knowing. Without caring.

While the Doctor still prevails, awaiting what the Ood sang to be his end.

It was prophesied, but the prophecy never said anything… about his friends, about the whole of Earth going down with him. About the Daleks, the Skaro Degradations, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres, raging war above. About the Time Lords raining hell down on Earth until the very last second. Surviving by escaping in consciousness only and letting the rest of creation burn in the fires they themselves set.

The Master stares at his own people, unbelieving in the face of the plot twist to his own history.

“You see now?” the Doctor says, tired. Too tired to even get up from the floor, too tired to ignore the sharp glass against his palm as he tries to stand. “That’s what they were planning in the final days of the War. I had to stop them.”

The gun. The fire. The betrayal.

His rules exist for a reason. They are unspoken for a reason.

That day, the Doctor had taken aim, had taken his shot. And a body had fallen to the red dusty ground, laughing in madness. Death, then, hadn’t meant the same it does now. They both now that.

“Then, take me with you, Lord President,” the Master almost begs, beneath the bravado. “Let me ascend into glory.”

Doctor and Master, both children of Gallifrey, rebellious and prodigious, both asked out of the premises often and, in the end, forever. Now, it’s the Master at whom Rassilon addresses his coldest, most inconsequential stare.

“You are diseased, albeit a disease of our own making. No more.”

Rassilon forgets, because he and the rest always forgot, that it was—quite often, not to say _always_ —Doctor and Master. Master and Doctor. Even at the end of time.

The click of a gun reminds him quickly, as the sound of mischievous laughter did once. But laughter is warm, and this is every opposite of that.

Rebellious, ever the first to be. The first to stand out from the group, the first to defy difference by welcoming it. He never had rules, because at his youth he hadn’t needed them yet. It is now when he has them that he only breaks them if it is strictly necessary that he must.

The Doctor, on his feet, holding a gun in his hand, aiming it at his Lord President. The first rebel.

A child, still, to the eyes of Rassilon, who can’t help but smile at him.

“Choose your enemy well. We are many,” Rassilon reminds him. “The Master is but one.”

“But he’s the President,” the voice of the Master whispers. Still sly, still treacherous. “Kill him, and Gallifrey could be yours.”

Hadn’t they dreamed once of the day when they could share an everything? Hadn’t they spoken of being free of the lock of the Time Lords? But they’d been children. They still hadn’t _seen_ beyond a Schism. Seeing and living are two different things, even for creatures of time. The Master still wasn’t master of anything. And the Doctor still hadn’t had to earn that name to feel at ease, at the cost of everything they’d dreamed of doing together—of being _together._

Wilfred’s words echo in his head. It’s his gun the Doctor’s gripping, kept in a drawer all these years. Just like Wilfred’s trapped in a glass cage now. And what for? He can’t let it be for nothing.

The Doctor turns faster than the eye can see and aims at the Master.

And the Master tries—oh, he _tries—_ but it’s little use. The Doctor’s face is hard as stone. He has never seen him look so, not even in the dark days of that war.

“He’s to blame, not me!” the Master yells, before he realizes turning things around is not going to get him anywhere. Not this time. “Oh, the link is inside my head. Kill me, the link gets broken, they go back.” This time, the Master has to play with the truth. So he does. His own face matches the Doctor’s. His own voice has never, not once, sounded like this. “You never would, you coward.” But the gun is still there, perfectly still in the air, and the finger around the trigger is not shaking. So there’s only one card left to play. “Go on, then. Do it.”

It’s the last resort of an already-dying man, to beg for a quicker death. Doctor and Master, Master and Doctor. There’s always some glue in between. Sometimes it’s life, sometimes it’s death. Never regeneration. Because they can never stay that long, can they? And they never quite seem to be able to kill one another, except the one time.

The Doctor holds his ground. But the Master just… shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. Whatever it is, here they are, facing their deaths at the end of time, together. There is only one person the Master will allow to finish him off, the one person he knows really _can’t._ Not anymore.

The gun clicks once more, and its cannon faces the Lord President.

“Exactly! It’s not just me, it’s him. He’s the link. Kill him!”

Both Doctor and Council ignore the Master.

“The final act of your life is murder,” Rassilon says slowly to the Doctor, somewhat amused by the ongoing, cyclical indecision. “But which one of us?”

For a moment, everything’s suspended. Not in time, in thought. Because thoughts are too quick to register in normal scales. And the Doctor thinks at mind-numbing speeds, trying to make sense of the Master and Gallifrey, the War, and the millions of people down on Earth that have been freed of one tyrant to end up dying under another. What ties it together? With astonishing clarity, it shines on him.

And there’s only one possible choice.

He turns back around with both his face and the gun to confront the Master, whose eyes cower at the Doctor’s betrayal, at the realization that, after all, he will die at the hand of his oldest enemy. His first friend.

“Get out of the way,” the Doctor growls instead.

The Master looks out of the corner of his eye and smirks to himself. Then, he moves aside, because it’s the only possible choice. The Doctor shoots at the tiny diamond behind him, the Whitepoint Star that is stabilizing the channel, the third element keeping the link flowing. Master, President, Star. Remove one, the connection crumbles.

Everything begins to shake and gravity, changed minutes ago by the pull of Gallifrey approaching, reverses slowly to the way it used to be. Now, it’s sucking the Time Lords back _in._

“The link is broken. Back into the Time War, Rassilon,” The Doctor yells. “Back into hell!”

“You’ll die with me, Doctor!” Rassilon says, raising his gauntlet to gather power and light. To shoot at him and end, once and for all, the rebel that in Rassilon’s future will win a war by wiping two races off the face of the universe.

“I know,” the Doctor accepts. It’s his destiny, it was written, and sung. _He will knock four times. And then you will die._ Master, President, Star. There is four knocks in the link, in the song of drums that the Doctor himself has made sure will not go on any longer.

He can almost hear it, his song. Ending. He doesn’t know what the last verses will say. He can only hope… and close his eyes.

Rassilon aims his charged gauntlet at the Doctor, its metal bluish with power, now fully ready to kill.

“Get out of the way!” the Master growls, standing up from the floor, and pulling up his dust-covered sleeves.

The Doctor knows what the Master is going to do before he does it, but instinct kicks in and he can’t stop himself from stepping back.

A thick beam of blue emerges from the Master’s hand and hits Rassilon’s chest. It’s the lifeforce of a Time Lord, the only thing on which the Master’s life and future pended after a failed resuscitation. But it’s clean as it pours out through his hand, and it’s stable. And now it has saved the Doctor’s life.

“You did this to me! All of my life!” the Master screams. He has to change hands, the stream of blue thinner and thinner as he speaks. It’s as if his words took more effort, sucked up too much power. “You… made… me!” His face becomes a skeleton of blue power, his words metallic and weak, even as they scratch his throat with roaring volume: “One! Two! Three! Four!”

He’s dying. The Master is dying.

“And now you’ve been unmade!” Rassilon yells. “You’re no use to anyone anymore!”

He’s been forced on his knees by the Master’s lifeforce made power, as the Time Lords begin to fade and Gallifrey disappears from the sky, pulled to the entrails of its own time and space.

The bright light absorbs them in a thunderous burst, and the darkness up above swallows the red planet called Gallifrey in a silent flash that lasts… and lasts...

_…the song…_

_…the song is ending…_

_…we will remember…_

_…we will remember you…_

Then, the Doctor hears sharp gasps by his side, noises closer to death than life, rasping against his own ears in the proximity. His hands can still touch the glass shards he spread all over the floor when he crash-landed. Sharp, cutting glass that reminds him of something important now. Something so, so important.

But he can’t quite place it. The gasps, the struggle for breath next to him keeps him from it.

He opens his eyes.

“I’m… alive. I’ve—there was—I’m still alive,” the Doctor mutters softly.

And he’s not the one that has survived.

A little to his right, a little above him on the floor. The Master. Breathing, but barely. Sitting up to touch the Doctor’s scratched up face like he doesn’t believe it or like he won’t. Because sometimes dreams are nothing but a reality you refuse to think is true.

Then—

Knock, knock, knock, knock. Four knocks. It was always going to be four knocks. Knock, knock, knock, knock.

It’s just a second. A couple of heartbeats—left heart, right heart, beating—, the Doctor looking to locate the sound that is going to kill him, a sound that is ultimately not the Master, not the Time Lords, and then it’s too late for everything he thought had time for.

The Master guffaws in his usual madness and stumbles outside, running free, and the Doctor can’t follow. Because Wilfred Mott is trapped in the Nuclear Bolt that’s still sending sporadic sparks into the air.

Four knocks. Wilfred’s knocked four times. He knocked four times times four.

And now he’s smiling at him, that crooked beaming smile that’s still so young, so lively.

The Doctor’s soul falls to the very center of the earth. If there was a black hole anywhere in the vicinity, it would have swallowed it. Rightfully so.

“They’re gone, then?” Wilfred asks. The Doctor nods heavily as he stands on his feet. How he can, how he even has the wherewithal to, knowing what he knows, not even he is able to discern. “Yeah, good-o. If you could let me out?”

“Yeah…” the Doctor barely mutters. To himself. As a reminder that he should.

“Only… this thing seems to be making a bit of a noise,” Wilfred says, looking up at the roof of the machine he’s trapped in. At the nuts and bolts and bright lights that seem to still be working, but not quite as they should.

“The Master,” the Doctor manages, because he has to, “left the Nuclear Bolt running. It’s gone into overload.” He looks down at his feet, then makes an effort to approach the glass cage his friend is in. “All five hundred thousand rads, about to flood that thing.”

With one trembling finger, the Doctor taps the glass absentmindedly.

“Oh,” Wilfred says, as if he did this every day. The end of the world, surviving it, and then having to fight to live past its aftermath. “Well, you’d better let me out, then.”

That’s the danger, the Doctor supposes. People think he does, too. People think he’s a Swiss blade, has solutions for every problem, and doesn’t remember a growing list of people he’s lost because of days like this one.

There’s a weight in his chest. And a gasping sound—screams, too—that he can hear even in the distance, calling to him.

“Except… it’s gone critical.” The Doctor’s jaw tightens as he goes on talking. And Wilfred… Wilfred’s entire face falls. “Touch one control and it floods.” Gently, the Doctor fishes his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket. “Even this would set it off.”

Wilfred’s eyes on his own, forgiving even when they shouldn’t be, are heavier on his conscience than genocide ever was. Without a doubt, private Mott did not sever a single life for as long as his service lasted. He would have jumped around a grenade, saved everyone else instead. Maybe it would be easier, this, if the Doctor had anything else to offer. Anything but what he’s about to say.

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do,” the Doctor says quietly. He matches Wilfred’s sad and resolute eyes with his tone. He means it. He tries to, at least. All he can hear is the wailing outside, the absolutely mad screams that pierce more than just his eardrums. It just keeps growing louder, madder. He turns around, just enough to look out through the window. “I’m sorry…”

There’s another sound as the Doctor speeds out of the room, but he is not close enough to hear. It’s Wilfred’s moan of acceptance. Of forgiveness. And of pain that everything he loves is safe and gone. The Doctor is just too busy, too caught up running, his feet catching on mismatching tile, on his own undone laces, following the dying sounds of a creature as old and alone as he is. He’s just too lost to realize why the life he’s left behind is not angry at him—and why that will be his own downfall. Wilfred waited, now he’s to die alone. And the Doctor just runs after a man that’s so far gone maybe there’ll be no saving him.

But there was once. And once is all he needs to keep running, to keep leaping over tables, past doors. Until he’s outside. Until the sound is at its loudest.

Because the Master is blue bones, thin gray membranous skin that glows when it’s there, that growls with static. And yet he’s still moving, dragging his body forward, away.

It’s not the agony of it, a slow death that comes after so much suffering it becomes unbearable to even keep your eyes open, that finally gets the Doctor to dash over the grass to him. It’s the sight of a skeleton, kept alive by force of will, not force of life. It’s the briefest flash of the face he knows, appearing for just a second, before the monstrous appearance of death takes over.

He props the Master up on his own knees, holding his head up, holding him close.

“It’s gone,” the Master tells him. “The noise, it’s gone.”

A bout of maniacal, weak chuckles follows and that face, young, all skin and human-like features, changing eyes, dissolves in the Doctor’s hands.

“The link’s broken,” the Doctor explains. “It erased the signal.”

“I got my freedom the same day I’ll die,” the Master says, his mouth dry. “How’s that for proper? It’s so… quiet. How can you bear it?”

“You’ll get used to it.” the Doctor hurries to reply, almost humorously. He holds his old friend in his arms, prepares to stand up. “Now come on.”

The Master grabs the Doctor’s collar with hands made of glowing bone to pull their heads closer together, and stares into his eyes like he could spew secrets into them.

“It’s _gone_ ,” he almost hisses, eyelids pulled so far back that it must hurt, trying to make the Doctor understand. “This is the way it has to be. It must have been written somewhere. Some old witch, scribbling my name all over the place.” He chuckles weakly again. “Just… don’t leave me alone.”

_In honor and peace, we face death squarely together,_ he thinks to himself.

An old Time Lord saying. One of the few that was forgotten with the epochs. In burials, no one says that anymore, but the sentiment remains. The best deaths are those that are valiant, and quiet. The best burials are those with people guarding the buried for days and days on end.

When they were kids, the two of them, they used to promise it to each other, late at night, when the Academy was too much to even think of sleeping or waking the next morning. _Together,_ they would whisper across rooms, from bed to bed. From the same one, sometimes. _Together. In honor and in peace. We face death squarely. Together._

They used to fantasize about battles they could win and die hand-in-hand in. Victors and martyrs, both. They used to imagine their joint regeneration. And their final death, their hands still entwined, facing battalions that came down from the orange skies.

“I’m not letting you _die_!” the Doctor says viciously, angry that the Master would even for one second consider dying today, just because he _is_ already dying. That he would even think the Doctor’s leaving him behind here. “We’re the only ones left. You’re not abandoning me again.”

“Damn it!” The Master jerks and curls up in the Doctor’s arms. From pain? From frustration? Desperation? “Why won’t you just let me die?”

“Because I owe you!” the Doctor yells. “I’ll kill you if you want, after. But I owe you this, first.”

They both are quiet for a moment to take that in. If the Doctor hadn’t acted on instinct, if he’d turned back to push the Master aside and faced Rassilon on his own, then maybe they might have more time now.

“And owing me is more important than my last wish? My dying wish? _Anyone_ ’s? Is that what you do? Ignore people for your own selfish reasons?”

“Yes,” the Doctor answers coldly.

“You could never kill me after, either.”

“I can damn well try. You’ll damn well make sure of that. Just let me _help_ you now!”

It’s when the Doctor begs for permission to help that the Master finally legs go of the collar of his torn jacket, and the Doctor rises with some effort from the grass that’s splotched his footwear, his pants, and his nails, to carry him into the TARDIS that he hid, invisible in his enemy’s own basement.

The Master trembles with each crisis, every time he comes back into the flesh he wears, every time death overcomes him, eating away at him, forcing him to scream. And the Doctor grits his teeth, and holds him closer, tighter. He will not let him fall.

But, on the last few steps, in front of the invisible machine, he realizes he has to put him down.

“Hidden in plain view…” the Master chuckles. “I should have known.”

“Exactly Pi seconds out of sync,” the Doctor says, carefully laying him upright against a wall for support, as he gets his screwdriver out to return some color to his blue box and opens its doors remotely.

“That’s cheating,” the Master replies. “You know it is.”

The Doctor doesn’t respond. He just picks him up again, like he didn’t weigh anything, like he was nothing but a couple of books and not a whole man that makes his knees shake like they’re about to give. It’s just a couple of steps. It’s just getting in. Then… he hasn’t thought about what happens _then._ But that’s the way his plans always work. And his plans _always_ work, don’t they?

There’s a hum inside that makes it feel like home, even if it isn’t. Even if it’s just a huge, eternal room that circles around planets, travels through space and time, and never arrives to its final destination because he’s never really going anywhere, just skipping around, running. He lost his home a long time ago to that very home itself, and the last piece of it was gone, too. Whatever is left of it, whatever remains of that Master, of that Doctor, it might not even be important enough within the people they’ve become.

“You might be one of them,” the Master tells him, as the Doctor lays him down on the floor. The beds are too far away, in corners of the corridor he can’t remember right now. He can’t even scramble a coherent visual thought of the last time he slept there and not on the musty chair right in this room, too far away from the controls, wrapped around in his own coat. “But this isn’t Gallifrey. You can’t save me. I’m dead anyway.”

“Just—just stay there,” the Doctor orders, firmly but softly. “And stay still!”

He turns around to face his console, to turn knobs and pull levers down. That’s how he thinks, by _doing_ before he’s even gotten there to the last, final thought that pieces it all together.

“Right!” he says, aloud, to a mostly empty room where there’s usually someone to echo his every word. To fill the gaps, the impossible notions, with rationalizations that make them work when he’s spiraling. “Whatever’s happening to you, it’s breaking you down to the point that even during regeneration, a crisis would kill you.”

“I told you you wouldn’t be able to figure it out.”

“Shut up,” the Doctor says. Then, to himself: “Just think! Think, think, _think_!” He brings his fingers to his temples and rubs hard. “Healers! New New York. They could cure anything, even create new illnesses. Maybe that’s the way to go. Inject you with every serum in the universe…” He scrunches his face. “But maybe that would only kill you faster.”

“Yes, please.”

“Just think!” the Doctor keeps muttering to himself. “What would they do in Gallifrey? How would they fix it, without knowing what it _is_?” His eyes open wide and he turns around to face the Master, throwing his hands in the air. The shoulders of his jacket look like pockets of air when he does. “YES! Well, of course!”

The Master stares. He is all eyes, as well, but because he has no choice. The rest of him is glowing bone that comes and goes like static. And a buzzing sound that’s almost a scream he keeps pushing further down on his throat to talk.

“No.”

The Doctor kneels by him, reaching out for his hand, so he can begin making his plan work. Little sparks of regeneration energy begin to emerge out of his skin like golden glimmer.

“It’s not the first time something like that happens. It can be done.”

“You’ll lose reincarnations.” As he slaps the Doctor’s hand away, the Master almost guffaws. Or the closest to that he is able to at the moment. He adds mockingly: “Do you want to _die_ for me, Doctor? Do you want that to be your _end_?”

Suddenly, the beginning of a beam that was forming on the Doctor’s lips fades into thinness.

“I’d be giving you my last,” he just replies. But his eyes, desolate one second, are nothing but pure stardom the next. “Hah! Stupid, stupid! It was right there in front of me and I didn’t see it. It’s not any normal affliction to simply cure or regenerate around. Resuscitation by ritual, wasn’t it?” The Master doesn’t respond, just keeps on staring disappointedly, helplessly, at him. “Where did they bring you back? What did they use to perform the rite?”

The Master shakes his head. Short locks of dyed light blond hair are spread all over the TARDIS’s floors. He’s the only bright thing in there. The rest is all metal and rust, and the burning heart of the stolen ship is well-ridden within.

“It’s too late. I killed them all.”

“I don’t care.” The Doctor leans in angrily, viciously. “Where. Is. It?”

In this glare between them, the Master gives in. There’s a monster in the Doctor that comes to the surface sometimes, that’s all selfishness and rage, and it’s more unstoppable than anything the Master has ever done in his many lives. The Time Lord Victorious always gets his way. If not how he originally planned to through persuasive means, he will take what he wants by force. The Doctor will rip the information out of his mind. And he won’t do it kindly.

The Master has no strength left in him to fight a telepathic duel in his dying mind. So he just nods and rests his head against the cold floor of the TARDIS. He tells him, closes his eyes, and lets the rocking of the ship lull the pain.

The Doctor did never learn how to fly. And they always laughed, didn’t they?, about how one day it would be their end. He wishes that it could come now. Master and Doctor, crashing. _Facing death squarely together._ With the tolling of the TARDIS in their ears, making up for the sound of drums that the Master’s brain keeps reaching out for and not finding, and the pain in their four hearts gone forever.

They land, and the Master doesn’t open his eyes, he just lets the Doctor carry him out on shakier and shakier knees. He laughs feebly to himself.

“Skinny, skinny Doctor,” he says. “I’ll be your downfall.”

“Signs point to no…” the Doctor mutters back, but he doesn’t look at him, he keeps walking on through the ruins of Broadfell Prison until he finds a solid enough column that seems to have resisted with dignity the blast of whatever demolished greater part of the building and killed all the people that still lie there, in awkward positions against cement and debris.

He lowers himself to the floor and sits the Master down against the pillar.

Now, the Master looks into his eyes, daring. They’re blue, even when skeletal. Warm and blue.

“Do you even know how to reverse it?” he teases. “Because I won’t tell you…”

The Doctor sighs. The Time Lord Victorious has disappeared, because he doesn’t need to be him now to _win,_ otherwise the Master would be writhing as all the answers poured out of his brain. But no… the Doctor can play this little game just fine, content with the assurance that he will find all the solutions. It just bothers him, and the Master is content with knowing exactly how much it does, that the Master wants to be stubborn and wait like a child for his fate to arrive. Only that fate isn’t going or not to a vacation spot they don’t like, it’s life or death.

“Black magic’s just science that hasn’t been discovered yet. So… yes… and no.” The Doctor crouches by the heavily breathing shape the Master is right now by a bunch of fallen stone and cement. “But by the looks of you, we might have time…”

“If I’d wanted soft, I would have gone to your _parents_.”

“My parents never liked you.”

“I never liked you either.”

“Maybe now that you’re dying so slowly you’ll finally tell me the things you never do.”

The Doctor manages a weak smile as he rises and begins looking for clues. For what he knows was key in resuscitating the Master because the Ood told him. A ring and Lucy. Most of the bodies around are too burned and too bloody to recognize them easily that way, but he’ll have to try. Time is of the essence. Even if now the Master isn’t screaming in agony, the crises are still happening.

“Maybe I will!” the Master yells back.

He watches as the Doctor looks for his tiny clues in a mess that is still smoking towards a hardly stable roof and ceiling. It must have truly been longer than he’s realized all these years, if he’s still sticking his tongue like a child, saying ‘I don’t like you’ out of something that’s not spite, that’s not stubbornness, and that is just… the helplessness of death and an unmoving, decaying body with a truly old and frazzled mind still active within.

They weren’t like this, back then. They were kids who didn’t stick their tongues out and say ‘I don’t like you’. They were infinitely young planetary troopers who found time for things they shouldn’t and dreamed of the stars.

The pair of them in the academy, two soldiers at eight years old, barely atoms in the cosmos. Playing games to pass the times, clutching each other to forget what they saw in the Schism, before they knew what they were to become. The Madman and the Runaway. Friends to enemies to… this.

The Doctor never carries guns because he isn’t good at direct killing. At facing the consequences of murder. It would take him a long time to shoot, a longer time to recover from the sight of blood pooling out of a lethal wound he’d caused. Running away means he can always just face it later.

One would rather kill to face everything faster, the other runs away so whatever there is ahead will blind his mind of the thoughts that force him to propel his stolen ship in the opposite direction of what he’s fleeing from.

The Doctor… And he was the genocidal one out of the two of them. Now, he’s scraping his knees on a junkyard as he gathers human DNA, trying to save the last life of the real murderer. What an odd pair of Time Lords they make…

_I should have killed you, back when I thought I was going to kill the whole of your precious little planet along with you,_ the Master thinks now, dying on the same junkyard. _Bled you so dry there would have been nothing inside of you anymore._ But what does it truly mean, to kill a Time Lord? And can it even be done? Kill their bodies, their minds still go into the Matrix. Kill their present selves, their pasts and futures still amble around the universe. But end everything they love, and any eternity that is given to them truly begins feeling like a curse. _I would have murdered them all just to watch you suffer, just to keep you close. Maybe then… you would have seen there’s more to all of this than a bunch of fleeting humans and a blue dot in space._ No, but the Doctor has already been dead for a long time. The child the Master befriended then is nothing but a grain of sand in the desert of a person that is now saving him.

And still… the Doctor, knowing his intent, would have saved him then, too. The Doctor held him when Lucy—that damn woman—shot her last. If there had been a way, the Doctor would have found it, brought him back right there, right then, even after everything. Would have given him another chance to bring the world down or to repent, even knowing what choice the Master would ultimately and always make.

_Maybe the whole universe got it wrong, calling_ me _the madman._

“I’ve got it.” Fumes emerge from the bowl, the cauldron. And the Doctor stands next to it, almost grinning. Almost proud. Is this what he looks like, with an audience? Almost like a hero before winning, still hopeful that he will, confident that he already has, in a way, just because he tried hard enough? And if he really is one, flaws aside, does he keep the promises he made before he became one?

“Will you really kill me after?” the Master asks.

The Doctor swallows and nods once.

“If you want.”

“Fight me until there’s nothing left?”

Because there is already nothing left. Before, there was only one thing. One constant, one line of thought the Master followed everywhere. Anywhere. And now it’s gone because of the Doctor. The agony of that silence and what it means is worse than the pain of dying. Facing death is infinitely easier. It’s quiet in a different, more peaceful way. It spares him the wondering.

It’s selfish. And the Doctor won’t have it.

“I’ll do anything. But you have to do this for me first.”

“Ah. You owe me. But I owe you.” The Master smirks. “What if it doesn’t work?”

One word. “Together.”

So the Doctor remembers. The promises. The late nights. The saying they made their own.

“Alright then,” the Master says. “Bring me to life.”

_In honor and peace, we face death squarely together._

_In honor and peace, we face_ life _squarely together._

* * *

Without pain, without noise. Who is he?

“Everything’s fine now. Back to normal,” the Doctor says. He’s careful in his tone, tentative. A normal Master is the face of chaos and disaster.

“You and I have _very_ different definitions of fine.” The Master sighs dramatically, plopping down on the musty chair that is definitely too far away from everything. “So… now what?”

They do have very different definitions. But here he is, a mass murderer—a mass _every_ thing, just sitting on a chair, picking at his nailbeds, pretending to be bored. His face is every layer of desolate, even when he’s trying hard to have it resemble the opposite.

Without pain, without noise. Who is he?

The Doctor knows that question, he’s wondered that himself many times without finding an answer, but he’s travelled alongside people who had the same doubts and who, somewhere along the line, somewhere in history, in time, in space, somewhere with him, found their own selves.

Master and Doctor, Doctor and Master. Once, they were going to do this, too. Once, the Doctor thought about what they might accomplish as old friends turned enemies, if they did do it.

So he pops the question. The eternal question.

“Fancy a trip?”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. To the stars.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “—we will remember you—” is actually a translated paraphrase of Murray Gold’s _Vale Decem_. Ad perpetuam memoriam —> We will remember you forevermore
> 
> “To the stars” is in reference to the same line in _Titanic_ because I used to be obsessed with that movie and I cannot stop myself.


	3. Ashes Wouldn’t Be My Final Form

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m preemptively very sorry for the length of the ending notes

The blue doors pop open to the infinite size of the universe.

“The heart of the Eagle Nebula,” the Doctor enunciates slowly, precisely so he’ll get the emphasis he thinks it needs. “Approximately one and a half million years old, counting down from the time where we took off, and almost seven thousand light years away from Earth. The Pillars of Creation—anything with the right kind of gases in it, really—is where the magic happens. All those stars—”

“Eighty-one hundred of them in just one of its clusters…” the Master adds the very second the Doctor stops for air. He’s forgetting that it’s not just anyone by his side. “Didn’t we fuse three quarters of one to power up a city somewhere?” the Master asks. “Or, rather: _don’t_ we?”

Circling space as if it were a ballroom, the TARDIS finally approaches one of the stars in the closest cluster. A majestic creation of elements that few have ever seen this closely.

“‘To the stars.’” The Master chuckles to himself. “I didn’t know you meant it literally. _C_ _lassic_.”

“Technically, at this distance, one star.” The Doctor says as the both of them continue to look at it. “It’s so far away from Earth, hidden among so many others, that in the 21st century they have no name for it yet. Just an ID number.” He pauses in admiration and respect for a mightiness that goes on unnoticed. “Like a pig raised for slaughter.”

Even when it’s so far away, its size impresses. Eighty times bigger than the sun and still relatively young for a main sequence star. It will never stop being absolutely breathtaking, to stand so close and yet so far to something like this. Much, much older than Master and Doctor combined. Older than most civilizations. Just there, fusing gradually, without noticing the passage of time, without caring. Simply… quite simply, there. Gravitating in space. The noise it must make, magnificent and so loud nothing could survive it, engulfed by the vacuum.

The Master cannot look away from it. The beauty of all that energy, hydrogen to helium to carbon and oxygen to nickel to iron, how much of it he could harvest, what it could do… Until it was giant and red, like the Gallifreyan star he hasn’t seen in many, many moons and will now never see again.

It’s the cycle of the universe. Destruction and creation. Break it, live in it. Little does it matter, the universe follows it blindly all the same.

“I’ve raised many stars for slaughter,” the Master confesses conversationally. All Time Lords have, it’s what they do in their backyards. Sit down below the skies and play with stellar energy, for school projects and pleasure, as if gas just birthed new clusters every morning without fail the way a mammal breeds itself every year to ensure the survival of its species. Time Lord civilization is built on star dust and the fourth dimension. “Brought them to _spectacular_ explosions just so I could see the pretty shapes from below.” The Master glances sideways at the Doctor. “You know how long those last. Most species are as hopeless in the blinding light of their star as they are in total darkness.”

Their eyes meet in space. The doors are open. There is, after all, only space between them. There’s only been just space. Now more than ever. And the Doctor keeps looking at him with those sad serious eyes the Master hadn’t seen in him for very long. It’s gone in a moment, because when two Time Lords stand before a star, their gazes are drawn to it. Even if their minds are not.

Eight-one hundred stars in a cluster and 75% of them will, one day, be gone from someone’s sky. Because Time Lords are a greedy species, and some like to blow them up for fuel. No one likes that more than the Master and yet—

_How many dark patches in the sky—patches that still register as giving off light in some places—because of_ you _?_ He asks himself.

“I’ve burned stars, too,” the Doctor mumbles. Just the one. Just for a while. A star that lived less because he needed to power a TARDIS beyond the levels of the imaginable in order to transform a one-way trip into a return one, despite all the pain in his hearts. “But watching them change on their own, gradually, without intervening in their natural process is … something else entirely.”

“And how boring is it? How long do stars live again? Oh, yes. Billions of years. Not even in your lifetime, Doctor, would you see both the birth and death of a star unless you were the one who caused it.”

“There’s more to all of this than just… _stars_ ,” the Doctor says patiently. In his mind, that is all there is, when there’s nothing left: the only possible path to walk, looking and wandering.

The Master made the opposite path out of his own sweat and tears, so he could just see and destroy everything in his way… and walk it faster.

This time, though, the Master does look. It’s the TARDIS that does the wandering.

Over the next half a minute, as it finds a proper orbit that won’t collision with any celestial bodies, it takes them around what, up close, turns out to be a binary star system, home to three planets of similar characteristics to Earth. Plenty of ocean from above, as well as green land, all three the perfect distance away from each other and both stars.

The Master catches the Doctor smiling to himself, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Everybody knows binary star systems are the best candidates for livable planets. Gallifrey itself has two suns. And by the looks of those three little blue dots and the satellites orbiting the planet the TARDIS is descending upon… at least a third of the system is inhabited.

He watches, discombobulated for a brief second, as the Doctor leaps back to the console and begins what is surely the most disconnected landing sequence anyone has ever seen.

“Oh, no. No way,” the Master says, surprisingly amused and a little offended at the same time at how casually the Doctor is pulling his usual stunt. Or what he imagines is the usual stunt. “I’m not one of your little pets. You don’t get to keep me, put me in your chest pocket, and carry me around.”

The Doctor stares up at him.

“Well, you’re not staying here alone. And I’m going down _there_.” He points at the monitor that always swerves a bit every time he tries a landing. Usually, there’s someone there to hold it steady, look at it and marvel. Or to ask questions, at least.

It’s all he can do right now, keep going as he knows how to. And all he knows is running, travelling. Same thing. Just… without a companion.

“Alone?” The Master does one of his whimsical little dramatic twirls as if he’s looking around the TARDIS for the first time. It’s not hard, then, to notice a small box of assorted little pieces and slyly slide a tiny chunk of blue discarded wood into his pocket when the Doctor isn’t looking. “Where _are_ your little pets, by the way? Where did you leave Ms. Jones?”

The Doctor’s face hardens, but he says nothing. Sometimes it’s better not to. Even so, the Master waltzes around all the way to him, as if the little stability of the floor didn’t affect him in the slightest. He’s even put his hands in his sweatshirt’s pockets.

“Touchy subject, is it?” he teases, coiling around the Doctor, willingly unaware of personal space. Because he’s almost died in the Doctor’s arms twice and it didn’t matter, then, either. So why would it now? “In a way, wasn’t I the first?”

Two children running around each other… But wasn’t one running _after_ the other, hoping for the other to turn back and…

_And what?_ The Master wonders.He’s spent many lives without that answer. Without even asking the question.

“Convenient, then. You’ll be the last…”

“Oh, right. You still have to kill me, and I’m killing you first the second you try.”

The Doctor actually smiles at the idea and that promise they keep making and breaking.

“Right,” he says right as the TARDIS’ breaks skid and it lands on firm ground, seven thousand light years away from where they took off, and several hundred years into the future. He nods at the Master. “Come on.”

The doors open again, and this time it’s air, full rich air that smells nothing like cars and poor oxygen, that reaches the Master. He’s happy to exit the TARDIS first, and the Doctor’s happy to let him. That bit is also part of his usual stunt, not that the Master would actually know that much.

But then, because he can’t help it, because it’s ingrained in who he is and what he does with company by his side, the Doctor looks around and takes a few steps _forward_ into the light and busyness of the street.

_Wasn’t I running after you, hoping you’d one day turn back and…_

Just like that, the Master is behind him again. In his shadow.

_…and see me?_

“Ah, so is this what it’s like?” He inhales deeply. “The Doctor’s Pet on an alien planet.”

The Doctor turns around. The suns hit his face and he wrinkles his eyes to keep most of their light out. It makes him look ten times younger than he did a few minutes before, contemplating the death of those very suns and all the cosmic life around them.

“D’you have to say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like it’s… written in big, bold, capital letters?”

“In my head, it is. Like the title of something. Something short and dull that only _you_ get to survive.”

And at the sound of those simple words, played for a quick laugh in a new place, the Doctor’s old again. Ancient. The wrinkles appear and his eyes take on the full force of two suns, like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t hurt.

But it must.

Something must have happened for the Doctor to look like this, like he’s out of his depth, alone, and a little too uncaring. The Doctor has never known how to be just that, has always strived to be the opposite because he is aware of the inherent selfishness of his soul, deep down, and fears the growth of its power if ever left unattended. That’s why he needs people by his side, to remind him not to be, should he forget.

“Isn’t that the point of us?” the Doctor just replies. That is the big clue, that he _just_ says it, walking onward onto the brave new world he’s discovered on a whim. “That we get to survive it all? Except our final death.”

“Honestly, if you ever find a point for _us—_ ” For a dead species that thought themselves on the top until they hit rock bottom. “—ring me. I’ll trash a party in your honor.”

“But isn’t it?”

For a moment, the Master almost considers it. That the Doctor has the same doubts. That everyone has. Or, at least, that everyone who was once alive on that planet did. Then, he laughs it off. It’s impossible. The Doctor might have questions, but he doesn’t just hesitate about these things. He’s the one putting two and two together. He probably invented a branch of mathematics that kids had to study after they graduated. And if that doesn’t sound just a tad crueler than trashing parties and killing stars…

“The point isn’t living or dying,” the Master also just says. These things are better when you just say them. Like you’re having a normal conversation on a bench by a little lake with someone who cares enough to really listen past ‘normal’. “The point is… what you do in between.” He grimaces dramatically. “Wow, philosophical much. Not good.”

“You’ve lived with that noise in your head for too long…” the Doctor says.

He pities him, the Doctor. Poor little Master, broken in all the wrong places, unlike him. No, the Doctor can break over and over again, but he will still get up, with deep cuts on his every finger and both palms, and mend himself just enough to go somewhere else and pretend he’s in one piece. What does he know about wholeness?

What is the point of the Time Lords? Maybe it is just existence. But it was Time Lords who took eight-year-olds and made monsters out of them. Monsters with questions. Monsters who now know only one thing.

Forward and fast.

Doctor and Master.

Master and Doctor.

Fast and forward.

Time just limits the perspective of how fast they are going, and in which direction. Right now, they just follow the street in what seems to be _forward._ North or south, west or east, it doesn’t matter. They’re just following the straight lines that delimit it.

“You could not have chosen a more original spot, could you?” the Master says. He just says that, too. Without a noise in his head to drive him, fast has instead become… a decent travelling speed. And the drums of war are now the hum of a console room. Not even his console room, to make matters worse. “Because _this—_ ” He twirls grandiosely again, all around him, “—could not look any more like good old Earth.”

He pulls the Doctor in, with his constant orbiting. The Master doesn’t need to walk in any direction. He just moves and everything comes his way. It’s what he’s always done. He just doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

The Doctor _tries_ to walk forward, in as much a straight line as possible, but he keeps stopping to talk to him, and in doing so he’s not paying nearly as much attention to the street as he should.

“Colonies. They tend to do that,” he says. “Still a few hundred years behind the current Earth time, but catching up fast.” He cranes his neck up to spy at a tower-like structure built on something that glows like glass in the sun and light- blue white synthetics. “And with new architectural styles! Ha! How’s that for original?”

“Makes you miss the lava krakens and the murderous sirens.” the Master says, only a little disappointedly. “Wonder where those have migrated to by now.”

“Planet Ulya,” the Doctor says, promptly heading to one of the street stalls and just casually grabbing something with a nod. That earns him a smile and a blush from the young man tending it. The Doctor winks, then returns to the Master as if the encounter hadn’t taken place. “We’re not going there. This is much nicer.”

“A lava monster is significantly more entertaining than… whatever that was. What was that?”

“A person,” the Doctor says patiently, unwrapping what he just half-stole thanks to his smile. “Being nice.”

“Nobody’s _just_ nice.”

“Yeah, some people are.”

“Oh, if that isn’t the oldest lie…” the Master smirks to himself, as if this premise explained so much about the Doctor. Maybe it does. “Come on, then. You’re staying behind on this _wondrous trip_ you brought me on.” He lifts his pitch a little. “Show me the world, Aladdin!”

The Doctor wrinkles his nose. “Ew, that song…”

“That _movie_. I hate it.”

The Doctor absent-mindedly splits whatever human edible he just acquired and hands one half over to the Master.

“You hate everything.”

“Not everything.” He takes one big bite of what they’re sharing and makes a face. “See? Not this. Food is not something to hate, unless it’s bad.” In order to properly lean onto him, the Master has to place a hand on his shoulder because the Doctor’s a little taller than he is, enough to make it physical. A physical lean. Chest against shoulder. “I only hate the important things.”

“Bad food and _A Whole New World_?” the Doctor says, not understanding, but his attention is immediately stolen away by a nearby building.

Not inherently tall or particularly wide, it rises a few stories higher than anything else in the whole street. The shifting blueness of the columns that hold the broadly white main structure together attract the eye to the partially transparent glass on the façade that let the sight in to the inside of the first few floors. A sign on the ground floor reads library just to the right of the double gray-blue doors.

“That’s not a brand-new world to explore on a magic carpet, that’s princess Jasmin’s cage-like palace!” the Master says, when he’s already half-giving up on the Doctor’s wide-open eyes and dropped jaw. “Don’t you dare.”

“It’ll just be a second,” the Doctor almost pleads, turning back to him. “You can wait outside.”

“If you make me wait outside, I won’t be _outside_ when you finally get tired of your little books.”

“I’m not _making_ you wait outside, but I imagine you don’t want to come in with me to—”

“Nine-hundred years old and you still have to go into every library you see, no matter where you are,” the Master says, rolling his eyes disapprovingly. “No matter who’s with you.”

“It’ll just be a second,” the Doctor says again.

Of course, they both go in, fully aware of the fact that it is not, because it never is, going to just be a second. That’s the power of libraries, one step in and somehow, somewhere, the clicky tile pulls you in, especially if it’s clean and pretty.

The space is surreal. One big bulbous tree stands in the middle of the ample room in the main entrance, and there’s just white all around, on the walls and on the tiled floor. The brown and green colors of that tree contrast with the stark nakedness of everything else. Then, thankfully enough, the next room opens to a more familiar sight with tables that have a bit more life and color to the materials, and digital devices presiding every single one of their surfaces.

“It’s like someone died and designed a really boring afterlife,” the Master says, half-quietly.

“It’s the future.”

“A really boring future. Do you see anyone here? Because I just see a tree.”

The Doctor takes off his coat and hangs it on the chair before he sits down, pulls himself closer to the device, and fishes out his glasses to read better. He even rubs his hands together.

“Allons-y.”

“If you start speaking French, I’m walking out.”

“You walked _out_ a long time ago,” the Doctor says, turning his head to the left a little.

The Master has just casually leaned on the nearest wall, his foot solidly pressed against the white surface. It’s going to leave a mark, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s just eating his food without a single concern in the world, enjoying the boredom and eternal quietness of the library, even though he said he wouldn’t.

“Well, I’m walking out _more_ ,” he says, mouth full. “I’ll write you a resignation letter. I’ll make someone sign it for effect.” He laughs at his own joke.

“Oooh, there’s something here,” the Doctor says. “Three colonies on the three planets of the system. Sent at two different points in the history of Earth. That’s interesting. They colonized this system at different rates. Here it says…” He pauses to keep scrolling on what seems to be a screen with an equipped eye-tracker.

The Master takes the opportunity to observe him quietly and without pressure. The universe has thrown everything at him in repeated occasions and yet here is again, getting excited at discovering parts of the future of his beloved Earth that he for some reason didn’t know about. All hunched towards the screen, pushing his glasses up. The Master didn’t even know he _needed_ them. But even Time Lord bodies get old.

“… that the first colony ships left Earth on the final months of the 28th century to arrive to planets Anawin and Taheri in the Hypatia binary system—this binary system—in the 98th century. We’re in the third planet, Rinea.”

The Master slides all the way onto the floor and closes his eyes, tired. Even after having eaten and survived a failed resuscitation, somehow he’s … _tired._ And hearing random history doesn’t help him want to sleep less. The Doctor sees it in him, an exhaustion he pushes away because the alternative is crashing somewhere for very, very long, until there’s not much left to stay alive on. But he’s still here, not on his literal feet right now, and yet fending off what could have ended up, back in England, as a literal disaster. The Doctor’s hearts get agitated just by remembering that not even an hour ago, the Master—his most immortal foe—had asked to die because he couldn’t see past the turmoil inside his own mind _._

The Doctor just shakes his head now and returns his eyes to the screen.

“Teleportation would have saved them so much time…” The Master sighs.

“Not if they didn’t know coordinates. At that time, they didn’t know the _right_ ones yet.”

“ _Hyperspace technology_ would have saved them so much time,” the Master says, altering his sentence ever so slightly.

The Doctor keeps scrolling. “28th to the 98th… So there must be little on record about either of the first two colonies, which technically are _not_ the first but the _last,_ because this one precedes them although it was sent out afterwards.”

With a groan, the Master stands back up and cracks his back.

“Well,” he says, “I’m sure you’ll find something anyway.” He smiles widely and pats the Doctor’s shoulders.

“Leaving?”

“No,” he says. “I’m going to _wait_ _inside._ Don’t burn your retinas while I’m gone.”

The Master leaves and the Doctor watches him leave. He doesn’t just _walk_ out of rooms, he sort of lingers with every step, as if he knew the Doctor was watching. But he doesn’t, because his back is turned, and because the Master has never cared about these things. The Master just _does_ , and whether or not people _do_ after him, that’s irrelevant to him. Sometimes, he does things beautifully. His stride is perfectly long and he never trips on his own feet, falling down, so his hands are never where they should be. The Doctor can’t run with his hands in his pockets; he falls and fears breaking whatever nose he might have then, and what if he happens to _like_ that particular nose? He doesn’t think the Master has ever broken his nose. Or anything. He’s got too much energy inside him to ever really _break._

The Master, the real main sequence star. Burning and burning, fusing. He’s too young to ever _stop._

But the Doctor? He feels so … worn. Like someone has sapped all that hydrogen and fused it somewhere they shouldn’t, somewhere that’s not his own core, to make something forbidden he can’t even reach. His core is mostly cold iron. And he’s fading. But even so, he has to go on looking like a young sun, and he has to go on fusing past the point of emptiness.

So he turns his eyes back to the screen and goes on reading about these colonies and these successors of the Earth. Because that is what has always kept him going. His little atoms, within the star of himself.

Even with a few tabs open and reading skills that almost surpass the software’s capabilities, there’s information there that’s not quite clear to him. Paragraphs he has to reread several times, maybe because of how they’re written, or because he’s thinking of something else.

“There is not one physical book in this entire synthetic structure I can flip through to avoid getting bored,” the Master announces himself back into the room after some time.

The Doctor looks up from the screen. The light in the room is slightly warmer, maybe an hour or so has passed into the afternoon. That black sweatshirt, even covered in dirt and ash, is still the most striking and strident thing in it. And the red t-shirt beneath it… even more so.

The Doctor smiles.

“Why would you find books in the future? It’s the future.”

“You can’t tear off pages out of digital editions, Doctor. Or scribble notes onto the margins.”

“You’re not thinking of normal _notes_ , are you?”

“No. But you got the idea anyway. You’re _learning_!”

The Master leans over the Doctor’s shoulder slowly, just to take a look at what he’s reading, at how much progress he’s done since he left. How much progress he’s gotten done in an hour or so. The Doctor can get lost in time the same way a child gets lost in a crowded street for a couple of minutes. Sixty seconds can turn into far more. Time stretches. And the Doctor has, admittedly, read on, but he’s still stuck on the same concepts, reading backwards and sideways. The Master presses his chest, just slightly, onto his shoulder so the screen will recognize _his_ eyes and move when he reads as well.

He tsks.

“Still on Anawin? Aren’t there like two more colonies?”

It takes the Doctor a second so much as to react. He’s perfectly still under him. Like he’d been frozen in place. Even the breath is stuck in his lungs, blocked by something he isn’t even aware of until it’s gone.

“I’ve—I’ve read a little about Rinea. Just decided to go back to Anawin and Taheri. Fascinating, isn’t it? The parallel development their technology will have compared to Earth’s chronological time, the way the same culture can branch out—”

“No. Read on now or it’ll be nightfall before you know it and we’ll have to spend the night here. Trapped in a library overnight.” The Master’s breath is loud, so very close to the Doctor’s ear. So is his chuckle, just the one, the brief intermission before he comes to his senses. Regains them. “Now, tell me, where the hell have you brought me?”

He could read it himself, but it’s much, much more entertaining if a voice narrates as the both of them read it on the screen. As the images supersede one another.

“Not the …” the Doctor mutters, “stars.” He leans towards the screen, enough so they won’t be touching anymore. Casually, so they won’t have to talk about it. “Early records speak mostly of two colonies. Plans for two, anyway.. Technological advances were already astronomical in the 28th century.”

“And?” The Master says. He knows where this is going, but he enjoys a little game.

“ _But,_ ” the Doctor says, “not travel wise. Just… in small, human things, like here. Sleek technology. A few political advances here and there. Improved conditions from previous invasions and the like. Yet the colonization plans for the Hypatia System stop there. So why send a third colony? And why send it _before_ Earth knew the first two planets are viable, too?”

“Anawin and Taheri are set to arrive in the late 98th century. Rinea…” the Master reads. “Left Earth in the 52th century, arrived before the 53th was done.” He laughs through his nose. “Hyperspace velocities, finally.”

“Exactly. And we’re standing in it. It’s the height of Earth technology years after Earth’s itself started to decay.” The Doctor inhales to quickly infodump. “We must be around the 85th century right now, give or take, and the original humans must have been scattered in space for… thousands of years now, and yet this is almost a perfect copy of what everything was like, on Earth, when they sent the colony cryotanks. Not just sleek, pleasant. Not just robots, almost humans, indistinguishable from the rest. It’s fascinating!”

“Terrifying.”

“But my question remains, why send a third shipment of colony material out of turn _and_ time?” the Doctor says. “Must have been something big…”

“Finally, he asks easy questions,” the Master says, leaving the back of the Doctor’s chair, to sit cross-legged on the table, near the monitor, which he now doesn’t need to see. “Back in my human days, there were stories about this massive intergalactic exodus into space around the time Rinea was _colonized_ by Earth _._ Every species suddenly wanted more space, so they just hopped on spaceships and went conquer some planets. I’m surprised you haven’t run into any of this in your many, many travels. Anyway, it might make sense for Earth to just have hurried into their colonization. And they had already sent ships to conquer two-thirds of a small system…”

“They didn’t know if the last planet was as livable as the other two,” the Doctor says, his jaw set. “Anawin or Taheri will still, as of this day, take thousands of years to arrive to Hypatia.”

“Well, they didn’t care much, then, did they? They just needed to ensure a corner of all that space for their little human race to survive and thrive somewhere that wasn’t dirty soily Earth. And they did, ’cause we’re standing in it!” The Master chuckles. “Bet you we will find old Earth Republic flags somewhere around here. Fancy some Capture The Flag before nightfall?”

The Doctor sits back and, for a moment, just stays still, looking at the data on the screen. At the picture of space from which he can see the two stars and three planets, orbiting around one another in perfect synchronicity. The humans made it beautiful in their own way, but they took risks. They made it _human._ In every way they could. He doesn’t doubt there’s a few flags dug into their soil, somewhere. That’s what humans did with their first moon, afraid some alien species already living there would claim it before they could.

“Yeah, why not?” he says as he pushes his chair off the table.

The Master instantly leaps off it as well.

“I wish it was that easy to get you to do most stuff.”

“It is,” the Doctor says, getting his coat. He doesn’t put it on. The Master stares for the duration of the time the Doctor normally would spend putting it on. “It is as easy as _asking_ me like you just did.”

“But not everything’s a game of Capture The Flag, is it?”

“No. Unfortunately.”

The Doctor smiles. He, too, wishes it was that easy. To fight over a mere piece of cloth and have no more worries in the world than a little game that no one wins because they can just sit down somewhere, supporting their backs on a wall, and talk about the universe and the light inside.

The Master smiles back. Something’s changing, and to hell if he’ll ever understand what, he’s just going with it, the way the Doctor does when he has no plan, no backup, just a screwdriver and a brain gearing loudly.

They head out through the circular room with a big old tree in the middle.

“Hi! My name’s Janet. Can I help you with anything?” says a voice on their right. A figure comes meet them with a pleasant-looking face and a warm, welcoming smile.

“Oh, we were just leaving,” the Doctor says. “But thanks.”

“In that case,” they say, “thank you very much for your stay. I hope it has been pleasant and fulfilling. And, of course, that you will return on another occasion to continue learning.”

They wink.

“Definitely pleasant and fulfilling,” the Doctor says, a little confused.

“You are the Doctor, correct?” they say.

He hesitates for a moment. “I tend to be, yes.”

“I think…” They wrinkle their face a little as they think, then broadening it up to a smile. “You will particularly enjoy the musical section. We have a large collection of articles on electrical guitars.” The Doctor makes a face of utter, complete confusion. Then, Janet turns to the Master. “And… as for you, Master… I’m thinking you might find the Bond novels entertaining.”

“Yeah, we’ll… we’ll give it a go,” the Doctor says, meaning to get rid of the help android and exit the library. “Thanks for the recommendation.”

“If I may? I just wanted to say, I’ve been programmed with profound elation at your interventions in Earth’s timeline, sir. Gratitude as well.” They offer the Doctor their hand, he takes it and shakes it. “It’s an honor to meet _The_ Doctor. And, of course, the Master that he is always fighting. They tell great stories about you here in Rinea.”

“Oh, believe me,” the Doctor says, “Rinea in itself is the great story.”

Finally, they manage to leave the library, but conversation is no longer flowing between the two of them, as they are no longer walking side-by-side. Once more, the Master has fallen behind, and this time… it’s intentional.

_Is that all history will remember me as? The Master who the Doctor is always fighting against?_ Not even a shadow, because a shadow at least is _different from._ All he is and has ever been is a plot device for the Doctor to shine brighter, to get more audience members to clap, to smile more widely. In his constant quest for the silence that has now been forced freely onto him, the Master has forgotten what awaits beneath that silence. A misery worse than what he had before. The truth. And having to face it whether he likes it or not. Because that’s what people do, without a noise in their heads. What the Doctor does.

And they are the same.

_I am what makes him the Doctor._

They’ve always been the same.

_And he is what made me the Master._

Two antitheses. The hero and the antihero, orbiting around each other like galaxies about to collide into each other. Once, then facing each other squarely. Then finally merging into one. Into just one. A man without even a shadow. A man without enemies. Not anymore.

_To hell with that,_ the Master tells himself. Owing each other matters very little. Death matters very little. He will not be the ‘without’ that accompanies the man that the Doctor is now. He would have easily settled for a simple ‘with’, he would have been happy to be a shadow, if only the Doctor had _ever_ looked at his own, noticed it there.

“I’m sorry,” says a tiny kid, about five or six years old, blocking their way out on the street. They’re looking up at the Doctor with big brown eyes. “Are you the Doctor?”

He leans in to be eye-level, smiling wide, truthfully, like he had nothing dark inside his hearts.

“Sure I am!” he says.

“Really?” the kid says excitedly. “You’re amazing.”

“Aw!”

The Master rolls his eyes and disconnects himself from the rest of it. It goes on. More kids join. There’s talk about _myth_ and _legend_ and more praise. And the Doctor sits on the perfectly clean ground with the kids. To be eye-level with them, he would say if anyone asked. But role models can’t ever be on the same level with the people who idolize them.

After a while, someone who looks like a parent shows up as well, with a giant grin on their face. Perhaps even more so than the children’s. The light of the suns confuses the sight, and it takes the Master a second to react intellectually. His hearts skip a beat the very second they register it. The face. _His_ face.

It can’t be.

Yet it is.

But I can’t be.

The Doctor lifts up his head at the face bathed in sunlight and smiles a smile crooked by all that light. He’s not seeing. When he sees it, his own expression, giddy in company and affection, loses elasticity and youth.

“Hi!” he still says.

So the Master isn’t imagining things. It’s there. A human being, in whatever century, wearing his very own face. Or, perhaps, the other way around. The Master has only had this face for so little. This human has had it all their life.

_But why would I choose this face?_

A face that lights up in the sun, that lights up when it grins. A face that genuinely grins at people like it costs nothing. A face with a body that just walks up to people, just to talk, just to help.

“Mara,” they say to what the Master assumes is their child in that tiny children crowd around the Doctor. “Who’s this new friend of yours?”

The Doctor recovers fast from the shock and goes back to the giddiness the children eat right up. Like he was always like that, like he didn’t house a terrible truth inside him that didn’t let him live the long life he was supposed to the way he was supposed to. Children see it, but they don’t understand it, and he’s really good at pretending it’s not there.

“I’m the Doctor,” he says, offering them a hand to shake. “Nice to meet you.”

“Amos.” They hold it firmly. “It’s sweet of you to stop by to talk to the kids.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble.”

He’s barely looking up at this strange parent with a well-known face, managing to make it look casual when he does. The Master could stay, miserably warm under the double light of the sun, and observe him suffer through his incessant deductions. But the black fabric on his skin is starting to heat up too much, and the wait is heavy on both his feet from standing up without having anything to do. His own face, right across from him, hasn’t even noticed that they’re mirrors of each other.

Nobody notices him leave.

Nobody notices because even when those kids leave and the Doctor stands up, more parents come by, and the process starts up again. It’s endless. He’s always the hero, even when he’s not doing anything. And everybody else is either a passerby or a victim.

_Or the villain_.

The Master is really good at being the villain. It’s in his body, even if it’s not in his head anymore, like an order he followed because he saw no other way to act. His hearts pound, the anger arrives, the … jealousy. And it becomes truly easy to stand up from under the tree that is now sheltering him from the sun, the tree that hides him in plain sight because the Doctor can’t see past his own nose sometimes. So he stands up and follows the echo of a noise he remembers and can evoke, never mind if it’s entirely gone from him.

Four knocks. It’s always four knocks. And how deliciously they echoed in his head, the sound of drums, of war. Of death and destruction. He knew how to follow that path, how that noise cancelled everything out. Even his anger. Even the pain. Even his doubts.

He walks out from under the tree, away from the main street where the TARDIS landed and the library is, and finds a glass shard somewhere to put between sunlight and dry grass. The rest is nature. Fire. Even in the height of human technology, synthetics burn. Wood burns. And that ugly old tree in the library will too, if it comes to it.

The thought makes so much stir within him that for a moment he thinks he has another death crisis coming. They look so pretty, those tall flaming tongues of fire, stretching and stretching like the universe. The Master stares at them until he’s too close and his forehead is running with sweat, then he just chuckles and runs away, back into his hiding place under the tree. In plain sight, with the flames behind him, marking him as the sole culprit. Because he is.

A criminal for the hero to spot and catch in front of a cheering crowd.

_You be the hero. But I made you that. Without me to chase and fight and beat, you’d be just like me._ He laughs again. No one hears him in a busy market street, and no one really cares to listen. _A nobody._ Because, in the end, the Doctor needs two things to be who he is. Someone to win over. And someone to applaud when he’s done. _Without that you’re as lost as the rest of us._

“Mister Doctor!” some of the kids are saying in the distance, loud enough for even the Master to hear. They tug at the Doctor’s coat with their little hands. Little, clean hands that have not and will not work a day in their lives. “There’s a fire!”

The Doctor snaps out of it then. The daydream in which he’s praised and loved and nothing’s in danger of collapse. And he does what he’s always done, turns to both sides— _turns to_ who he remembers being there two seconds ago. Who now isn’t there.

“Master?” he calls.

He can smell the fire now. It’s close. Burning fast through grass and leaves. Soon, through more stable structures and, if they don’t put it out fast, whoever’s in the way. Fire’s inexorable.

“MASTER!” he shouts loudly into the street.

There’s people running about in so many directions that he no longer knows if they have somehow organized to stop the fire from spreading or not. He tries to track movement. Tries to track color. He looks for black and red. And blond hair. He finds him under a tree, just sitting there, hunched over himself and… laughing.

The Doctor runs. He thinks he can hear water somewhere, see the parent with the well-known face carry children to safety. Systems being activated to put out the fire. Someplace inside him he can find enough guilt to blame himself for this. For not helping and for having helped cause it.

The tree under which the Master sits has caught fire now. So the Doctor doesn’t think, he just grabs him by the hood of his sweatshirt and pulls him up by force, drags him a couple streets into a less crowded alleyway, and pushes him against a wall.

Oh, the worry, the panic in his eyes… The Master looks into them and can’t help but keep laughing, because it’s just… ironic. Panic. _At what, Doctor?_ He couldn’t possibly ever place that worry. It’s ancient; that, he can recognize. They used to build bedtime stories out of that worry.

The Doctor pushes him harder against the wall, grabbing him by both sides of his collar and lifting him a few inches off the ground. A skinny thing and yet he has such strength when he needs it.

“What the hell are you playing at?”

“Making Rinea an even better story. Where better to start than a great fire to burn it all down!”

If the Doctor has suspected—rightfully so—, now he knows.

The Master smirks his old smirk, the one that denotes not caring. And the Doctor hisses wordlessly at him. It hurts both ways. It hurts them both. And the Master feels good in his pain. He feels like he used to for a moment, and maybe that’s all he needed, to stop going against the current of things and just… follow the old rules that never made him stumble.

But he makes the mistake now of looking down at the Doctor’s fingers, almost around his neck. There’s cuts on them. From the glass down at the mansion on Earth they’ve both escaped alive, they’ve both run from. There’s cuts on his face, too. Dry blood on skin that might sting, if he put his own fingertips over it.

He just tried to burn a street to the ground. It should be simple, to raise a hand and just… cover a wound with his dirty hand. Why isn’t he doing that?

The Master’s smile fades. And he hears the sizzling a few yards away. Someone’s finally put that fire out. Inside his hearts, the pounding finally feels less like it used to, and more like now. More like a warning. And a cooldown.

The Doctor feels it, his pulse, and puts him back down on the ground, but doesn’t let go of his sweatshirt.

“It wasn’t just burning stars,” the Master says. It takes the Doctor a second to place what previous conversation those words are following. “You have to watch them burn to a crisp from somewhere, don’t you? And everywhere I went, this—” He theatrically gestures around himself with both arms. “—is what awaited me. People saying the wrong names because you are all that ever survived all of Time Lord history.”

“I’m not a Time Lord to them,” the Doctor mutters softly, dropping both hands by his sides just as the Master does. “I’m just a weird someone in a box who passes by sometimes and happens to know things.”

The Master pierces his eyes with his own.

“And what am I?”

“Usually, you’re the one I fail to stop. But no one said that had to be permanent.” The Doctor stares back for some seconds. “You weren’t always that.”

No, there’d been a time, before everything, when they’d been nothing but free children, running around the pastures of red grass that stretched across the Master’s family’s estates, rolling on those fields all day, calling up at the sky and dreaming that one day someone would name stars after them. There’d been a time when there had been nothing but two little children playing together under the light of two suns.

Then, they’d been forced to grow up. And they’d only grown up together for a while. Time had other plans for each of them.

_Look at us now,_ the Master thinks.

He wasn’t always the Doctor’s antithesis. He isn’t now. But how much of him still wants to be? How much of him has always wanted to just… _stop_? Stop and go back to the red grass? Who is he if those questions have no answers? If Gallifrey is always disappearing in its fixed point in space and time, and there’s no way to ever know what that little kid wanted, what the adult he became wants? Who is the Master now, right now? Without a noise to guide him, without doing all he’s ever known, without his life-long certainties that have turned out to be lies? Who will he choose to be? Not the Doctor’s antithesis. That was a really boring and predictable thing to be.

But he was just… so _good_ at that. At being the villain in _someone else_ ’s story, not just a simple villain. At being stopped by the same person, who would always have enough mercy in him to forgive all the villainess in the world. At killing so fast the pain of death never really caught up with him. He’d been so _good_ at that, now what does he have left?

The Doctor?

Is that what he’s going to _choose_? To join him instead of to fight him?

“They’re normal,” the Doctor says softly.

“Who?”

“Don’t. Don’t pretend. Not now. You saw it too. I know you did.”

The Master snorts gently, leaning his head back against the wall.

“They’re normal. Their name is Amos. They have a house, and a business. And a child named Mara who believes in a moon dragon living inside one of the suns. They like to stay up all night reading stories, and told me a few about me I hadn’t heard yet. Which is pretty rare.”

“Figures.”

“Amos has a permanent ringing in their ear,” the Doctor says, seriously. “The doctors can’t figure out why.” His eyes meet the Master’s. “And… they’re kind.”

“I would have let this city burn to the ground,” the Master reminds him, his eyes and voice cold.

“I know. But you didn’t.”

“Because you noticed.”

“That’s what I do.” The Doctor exhales for a couple of seconds. Then, adds, his voice quieter. “Anyway, there’s probably not going to be an Earth Republic flag here. Maybe one from the New Republic— at least prototypes for it, anyway.” He smiles a little at the Master. “But… I’m sure either Anawin or Taheri have one, since they’re the oldest—in Earth’s time, at least. We could look for one there.”

The Master holds his gaze, but he doesn’t return the smile.

“It doesn’t matter where we go,” he says matter-of-factly. “People know who you are everywhere.”

_The Doctor in his TARDIS, saving the day. And the Master, wrecking it._

That’s always been the tragedy of it. All of time and all of space, and the Doctor’s name is all everybody ever knows, even when they don’t. Even when it’s hidden in the back of their minds. A secret that resurfaces when they see him.

And the Master is always the Master, regardless of who sees and when they’re seeing him. A Time Lord with the wrong face, in the wrong timeline. And living an ongoing conflict within that he can’t ever solve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Astronomy details learned in the _Cosmology and Astronomy_ course in [Khan Academy](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy) that I was into right as I came up with the idea for the fic. As it turns out, Time Lords and stars are a thing, so I was in luck! Any mistakes are my own, though.
> 
> “I only hate the important things.”/“Bad food and A Whole New World?” I never thought this would be a goddamn line in my DW fic but it is.
> 
> “Break it, live in it. Little does it matter, the universe follows it blindly all the same.” Not intentional when first drafted, but funnily enough, this resembles the structure and tone of Thanos’s famous quote from _Infinity War_ , “Dread it, run from it, destiny arrives all the same. And now it’s here. Or should I say I am?”
> 
> “Planet Ulya” is me going “monsters and sirens” = Odyssey, then Odyssey –> Odysseus –> Ulysses and… yeah XD 
> 
> “Trapped in a library overnight” is a literal quote from _Fangirl_ by Rainbow Rowell.
> 
> “Hi! My name’s Janet.” Could not resist a _The Good Place_ reference.
> 
> This fic is the fic of references. And I haven’t even listed all the Doctor Who ones ^^


	4. Because I’d Have to Rise Again and Decide

They’re not really playing Capture The Flag, but it doesn’t matter. They weren’t really _seeing_ the stars, either. Before. Their promise was never just about seeing the stars. It was about time.

Stealing it, maybe, from where it couldn’t be stolen. And running away with it. So far, so fast. That way, nobody would notice. Nobody would chase them.

They’ve just run in opposing directions all their lives. Meeting in the middle, sometimes. When they’d run all the way and had to run back. Meeting for a second, then away again, each towards their own end of the universe.

The Master could very easily just overpower him now. Pin him against the floor and knock him unconscious long enough to fly the TARDIS somewhere, then ditch him there. And run and run and run. Away. Start again, make a better name for himself that all planets feared more than Master and _ingrained_ in their memories and minds faster than Doctor. He wants to. He already _has,_ a few times. Something must have gone wrong somehow, some _when._

Instead, he’s just sitting by the console, on that ugly musty chair the Doctor avoids like the plague because he can’t sit or stand still. Permanent movement equals—almost equals—running.

“Let us just see…” the Doctor suggests softly, after long periods of silence that don’t need to be filled with words after what happened on Rinea. The TARDIS crowds the empty gaps with mechanical noise just fine. The Master pretends that turning a new page will change the book’s title, that going to a new planet will obliterate what he’s done on the last. It’s what the Doctor’s encouraging. “… what all of this looks in the future, shall we?”

“The future future. You could keep going like this. Until the literal end of time. What, then? Would you go backwards? Until the literal beginning?” the Master teases. His bitterness lingers still, but the more words are spoken, the less he remembers about that parent in the street and their kind face. “Big Bang?”

“Nah. All atoms back then, condensed into one single particle.” There’s no enthusiasm about travelling in the Doctor’s voice now. Just fact. Cold, hard fact. “No fun in that.”

“Because it would be quiet?”

The myth of noise and quietude, two extremes that in the universe just add up to the same thing. It’s the vacuum of space that makes them so. But, figuratively, standing right next to them, there’s cosmic events that are so much _louder_ and take so much more space than others.

The Doctor’s always been a bit of both. Peace and quiet, chaos and thunder. Lately, his eyes have seen the last of the noise, the beginning of the last downpour.

“And lonely.”

“Not when it finally explodes.” The Master smiles to himself. “Beautiful chaos right there, expanding everywhere at once. Nothing we’ve both ever seen could compare to that.”

“Tell you what?” the Doctor says, adjusting the monitors as the TARDIS lands. “We could do that next. Just you and me, and that first explosion. The birth of the universe.”

“One hell of a date, that.” For once, the Master doesn’t sound ironic. But, before he can reply, the Doctor’s face contorts into a grimace, a pronounced frown that his usual pair of glasses, which he fishes out of his jacket pocket, only pronounce more once he puts them on. The Master wets his lips slowly. “Something off with the monitor?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer and simply stands next to the Doctor, shoulder to shoulder, and stares at the screen. The readings are all perfectly fine, the coordinates more than correct. They are where they are supposed to be. Same solar system, the new sights of Anawin, a few hundred years into the future, but the image…

The Master gets a hold of it and manages to access images recorded from above, when they’d been descending onto Anawin. Like its twin planet, Taheri, it’s entirely deserted. But… orbiting quietly, Rinea remains unchanged, blue and green, striped by white clouds here and there. When the Master moves his fingers away from the screen, the image returns to what’s outside of the TARDIS now, the desert up close.

“Hmmm,” the Doctor says. And he’s trying hard to make it sound disinterested, but there it is, the spark that says otherwise. The little breath of hydrogen that says _alive_ inside the heart of a star, the little bit of chaos in his chronic rain.

“You’re _loving_ this.”

“Slightly,” the Doctor says, moving away from the monitor and taking off his coat. He hangs it where he always does before he gets to the TARDIS doors and gingerly peeks between them. When he turns back at the Master, the spark has become a lighthouse guiding ships in the long winter night. “An entire Earth-like planet with barely a few small and _definitely_ geographically bound deserts, now completely covered in sand, sunlight, and little else.”

The Master swivels dramatically in the chair, pretending to pay attention to the ceiling and how it’s decorated.

“Come on. One mystery. It’s better than libraries,” the Doctor says from the door. “Great appetizer for the beginning of the universe, too.”

The Master makes one pained face at him that is at least 25% affection in disguise. And he is, after all, the master of all disguises, which means that he must be intentionally displaying that 25%.

“One _last_ mystery before the Big Bang,” he agrees. “And it’d better _be_ one… big… bang.”

“Almost a thousand years on this universe and you’ve never been to the Big Bang.” The Doctor tsks, then holds the door open with one hand and smiles lopsidedly. “Take that sweatshirt off. You’re going to be hot under those suns.”

The Master does not bat an eye as he removes it in front of him and throws it on top of the musty chair over his head without even turning around.

“I’m always hot,” he says matter-of-factly.

Then he walks out of the TARDIS.

The second he steps outside into the full force of those two suns, his body begins to feel like it’s boiling. Just from standing there. And the sand that covers every last inch of the world reflects the heat that comes down on the two of them like murderous rain.

“Lovely,” he mutters.

The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS behind him and closes the door. He stares at the suns with a grin on his face, as if he wanted to rub in the fact that he’d told him so. One second, the Master is watching him gape at those suns as if his magical Time Lord retinas could take it, and the next the Doctor is elegantly crouching to feel the sand.

“Weird,” the Doctor says, having it fall through his knuckles several times. “It’s… thin.”

“It’s _sand_.”

“Exactly. It’s supposed to have bits in it.”

“Bits? What bits?”

“I don’t know. Bigger bits. Bits that aren’t sand.”

He stops for a moment to lower himself parallel to the ground and opens his mouth just a tad.

“I’m going to stop you right _there,_ ” the Master says, grabbing him by the jacket and pulling upwards like he weighs nothing. “Licking sand? Not your brightest idea.”

The Doctor turns his head in what looks like it’s a very painful position to be staring up at him.

“It’s worked before.”

“I’d like to know where, how, and with whom. Just in case.”

“I don’t know. Some planet with some girl.” The Doctor keeps looking at him, still hanging an inch or two over the layer of sand. “Will you let me go? It’s a fail-safe test to know what it’s made of.”

The Master puts him back, gingerly. It is very hard at the moment to trust him. Or his methods.

“On principle, I can’t watch you do that to yourself.”

He closes his eyes, more in resignation than anything else. He opens them when he hears the Doctor make happy licking noises which stir things inside his hearts that shouldn’t be stirred in this _sand_ -licking context.

“Aha! Not sand!” The Doctor pauses. “Honestly, it tastes kind of like _bone…_ ”

“That doesn’t sound nearly as good as you think it does.”

The Doctor stands back up to his feet, dusts the not-sand off his ragged pants.

“It’s not. Remember the planet I was on with this girl?”

“I’m choosing to assume the girl’s not important. Girls are usually not that important with you.”

“Only sometimes, but carrying on… Well, it turned out to be organic remains, and the species that did it had this strange attraction to metal because of their exoskeleton. And…” They both look around at the city that awaits not far away from where they’re standing. Except for the not-sand problem, every structure in it looks perfectly intact. Dirty, abandoned, but perfectly recognizable as a 28th century human city. “All the metal is still here.”

“So? It’s an infinite universe. Your metal-eating species could have evolved not to eat metal anymore in some far-off corner of it.”

“I suppose it makes sense for them to have evolved,” the Doctor mutters, almost to himself. “Some time must have certainly passed since.”

He begins walking forward quite eagerly, as if to meet his mystery up close and solve it just by making contact with it. Just by standing close to it.

The Master stays back, confused and a little offended by the Doctor’s sheer capacity to walk into anything that screams death and danger.

“I promise it gets more fun towards the end,” the Doctor says impatiently without turning back to look at him.

“There’s not even anyone here left to save!” the Master shouts, shaking his head, but walking on anyway. It’s not like the Doctor can see him do so. The Doctor never really could, he just blindly trusted the Master would. And the Master always resigned himself to the reality that he always _was_ going to follow anyway.

“Or anyone to accidentally slash intentionally murder. Perfect place for us right now!” is the Doctor’s reply.

The Master groans to himself. It is a test. This whole ‘to the stars’ story the Doctor’s telling himself and pseudo-sharing with him. It’s nothing but a test on the man who lived with a noise all his life and has now been deprived not only of it but what it meant to live with it. They are on another street, only this one’s empty, and there’s not much of a chance he would be able to _burn_ anything this time around. It’s a test to see who he is without it. And he’s got no answers about it so far. Not any the Doctor will like.

For the Doctor, though… the Master isn’t quite sure what his test is about. He’s seen the look on the Doctor’s face, the way he suddenly ages centuries and millennia when he thinks nobody is paying attention. And he’s alone. No Martha Jones or Donna Noble by his side to take his hand into any and all adventures. The Doctor was never good at being alone. He may be the first to walk into anything screaming death and danger, but he keeps looking back and smiling at the person walking a few paces behind him.

_A mystery, an adventure before him. A companion behind him._

Who is the Doctor without a companion to smile back at him? The Master wonders. The Master has always wondered, since the day he stopped being the one who was smiling back in the Doctor’s shadow.

On they walk now, towards the nearest structure, somewhere near and far at the same time. The sand, although not thick, makes it hard to feel like they’re moving forward at all. It makes it all look ancient and farther away than it is. Like they’re spending far more time fighting to take a step than they are actually gaining terrain on the city that hides so well in the horizon sometimes the Master doubts they’ll ever get there.

There’s vehicles abandoned by the path they’ve taken, half-eaten by the sand. Electrical streetlights by a road they can’t see, no longer shining on it, lighting the way. It’s a dead planet.

“I keep waiting for something interesting to happen, but at this rate either you or I will die and archaeologists from the future will get rich when they find our beautiful two-hearted remains.” The Master wrinkles his face. He’s caught up with the Doctor’s ample stride. “Archaeologists getting rich off of time. Sounds like the entirety of archaeology! They’d have a field day here, that’s for sure.”

“That, they would. And they would possibly understand more than we do at the moment. So that’s something in their favor.”

The Master cracks up.

“Didn’t you hate the lot with _infinite_ loathing?”

“Didn’t we all?” The Doctor says. He looks at the shapes the wind draws on the sand as he walks, one hand in his pocket, the other free to stop his fall should he trip. Nobody wants that beautiful nose to break and bleed in the middle of literal human nowhere. “Back in Gallifrey?”

He sighs and looks up at the remains of the city, getting closer and closer with each step they take now.

“My wife’s an archaeologist. Or… at least I think she will be.”

The Master laughs again.

“You? With a wife?” he says mockingly. “After what happened, you went and found yourself a wife?”

The Doctor glares at him. They both know ‘what happened’. Happy families perished, like the thirst of the Time Lords. Both had to, if he wanted to save the universe from eternal darkness. He sacrificed his own family. His own people. His own goodness. And he’s been running from it ever since. Because facing it would destroy him.

“I bet sometimes you wonder how much easier it all would have been _for you_ if we’d lost that war,” the Master says, a little more softly. But not enough. He still means to draw blood.

Sometimes the Doctor walks around, swirling in his little blue box, as if an entire race of (sometimes admittedly terrible) people hadn’t been erased because of what he did. He walks around as if he’d forgotten it. The Master had had family, too. He’d been dead long before the war, only brought back to fight in it and die in it again. _Time Lords are always dying_ , he thinks now. _Not living, dying._ But his family had still been there the day the Doctor had made his irrevocable choice.

“I would have been better off if it had never _started._ ”

“If you didn’t do what you do, you could have brought them all back. If you’d shot Rassilon.” The Master kicks up a bit of sand, distractedly. It always takes a little longer to fall than it does to ascend. “I’ll never understand the way that brain of yours operates, honestly. As President, you could have ended the war, then done your bit against the Daleks—I hear you’re good at that—” He smiles, almost warmly. Even he has heard the stories about the Oncoming Storm. “And there they’d be. Same as they were.” His face hardens suddenly, at the memories. He knew the Doctor’s family, once. As the Doctor knew his. That, too, was a fixed event. _Once_. “Yet still you didn’t. Is preserving the timeline that important?”

The Doctor walks a few steps forward in contemplating silence, the Master doesn’t think he’s going to get an answer, then:

“That war… happened a long time ago. Maybe preserving what came after it—what there is still to come—is worth a lot more to me now.”

“Ah, keeper of past, present and future. Doesn’t it get _exhausting_? Doesn’t it _hurt_ to lose all three in the process, while you safeguard everyone else’s?”

“It’s people like you I safeguard it from.”

“Hence it’s not just seeing the universe you do, Doctor,” the Master says grandiosely. “ _It’s never been!_ With you, it’s aiding and abetting, taking the fall in order to save someone else’s life.”

“Yeah, and with you it’s mayhem and fire and not knowing who the next victim will be!” All teeth. The Doctor is all teeth when he’s vicious.

“But that makes me _fun_ in a fight. Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t take over Rassilon. I’m quite sure your choices would have been… different than his.” The Master grins again. “You’d have had to do without me.”

The President had brought the Master back during the war, because he might have been Gallifrey’s broken child, but he _had_ been useful in a fight.

The Doctor would have chosen differently. He wouldn’t have set the Master loose during a war that span around all time eras and involved so many species. The Doctor had _shot_ him, in fact, to keep him from betraying him. Not the Time Lord Council, _him._ Everyone who was someone was against the Council, then.

“Fat lot of good you did,” the Doctor grumbles now at the memories.

“ _Some_ good. I’m still here, after all. Trailing after the great Doctor in the middle of nowhere, bored. Fat lot of good _you_ must be.” The Master grins.

And, despite any history between them, that grin is impossibly infectious. The Doctor can’t help but return it, even if it’s partially. They keep meeting halfway in their flight across the universe, no shame in denying that. No shame in feeling a bit inspired by it.

His eyes, never bothered by any light, no matter how intense, blink instinctively when he spots a glint of those suns on the glass of tall skyscrapers.

“It’s never the middle of nowhere…” he mutters.

They have arrived close enough to everything to see, in detail, exactly what has been left over of this part of human civilization. They enter the perfectly planned maze of streets and squares, trying to find meaning in what they’re seeing. But the farther they go, the less sense everything makes.

The Doctor keeps looking up at suns, at their reflection on old glass, and he keeps walking faster and faster, as if he might lose them unless he pays the exact amount of attention to the right corner at the right time.

“I don’t understand,” he says when he finally stops, breathless.

He stops and turns around, still looking, still avid for something that’s not there. The Master quietly watches him, arching an eyebrow.

“It’s all here,” the Master ventures to say what they’re both thinking. “A little worn, but exactly the same as it probably was.”

“It’s all untouched! Undamaged,” the Doctor says. He tries to take his entire surroundings at once again, bending his neck back so much it looks like it might snap in half. “What happened here that ended life so silently?”

Nowhere close that they have seen is there a tree, a breadth of green. A bird, even. Or a lizard, scurrying away between the shadowed walls of buildings.

“Well, you’re not asking me, but if you were… I’d say nothing _could have_ done it. Sometimes planets just… die,” the Master adds when he sees the Doctor beginning to express something very close to ‘murderous’ in his particular direction. “It’s not human in origin—humans are big destroyers, you’d know. It’s not typically extraterrestrial, or we’d have ourselves a little bombed city and rests of the weapon that did it, as well as, probably, the invading species somewhere.”

“ _You_ ’d know.”

“Mmmm, _yeah._ I can’t name one species I know that operates like that, neither as invaders nor plain old destroyers.” The Master raises both eyebrows at the Doctor now and he smirks, just slightly, just so he can twitch the corner of his lips. “Can you? At the top of your head?”

“Just one. And the permanence of metal structures rules them out.”

“Great, then. Let’s go inside one of these bad boys,” the Master says, pointing his head at the buildings around them. “This heat is _killing_ me. And we’re not going to figure anything out just by gaping at it.”

“We might. I usually do. It usually stares me in the face.”

“It’s not staring you in the face now, I would notice. I’m not your one of your little pets, remember? I’m you, if you’d taken a different road.”

Carelessly, the Master half-pushes the Doctor into the nearest building, and they both sigh under the slightly cooler refuge of a ceiling, and the little patches of darkness that come with it.

The Doctor, usually stoically ready to face any weather and any monster, leans against a wall, putting his glasses back into his pocket, and closes his eyes, breathing loudly.

The Master simply stands by, watching him without making his intentions clear. They both suspect what they could be. They both have different suspicions, different theories about those intentions. It all boils down to a few choices. Choices to be made.

“What road do you think would have led you to becoming me?” the Master asks, his face hard as stone.

The Doctor breathes out, then in. His heartbeats are slowing down, slightly.

“I did take it,” he says. “But I didn’t let it take _me._ Not entirely, not all the time.” Not without some effort, he stands upright again, away from the wall. “And that’s what makes you and I different. What you hardly ever want to see as a true difference.” He pauses to look the Master in the eye, in the distance. “But it is.”

The Master smiles to himself.

“Does that reasoning help you sleep better at night?” he asks, meaning to draw blood. Again. To hurt or at least help himself hurt less.

The Doctor holds his gaze coldly.

“I haven’t really slept like I used to in a long time. But when I’m awake… what I _do_ , it’s worth being awake for.”

The Master pretends he hasn’t heard that, nor understood what it means, and just paces around the room. Dark, without any windows, and the few ones that it has have been dirtied up with time and rust to not let much light in, although sufficient. There’s some sand still inside covering mostly the floor.

“If they’re all dead, and I’m assuming they are,” the Master asks, “why are there no skeletons? Erosion doesn’t get them as quickly inside.” The Doctor looks at him. Of course he would know. And of course he finds that information useful now. “And this _is_ the main entrance. There should be a few.”

“I’m regretting having brought you along.”

“Why? You know I’m right.”

“Precisely because I know you’re right. I don’t like this… The sand, the remains… How does it _connect_?”

“Have you ever heard of the Vashta Nerada?” the Master asks.

The Doctor stares at him.

“So that’s a yes, then.”

Everyone has heard of a species that feasts in the dark, waiting for anything to enter it. It’s what keeps people scared of it, everywhere. But the Doctor… if he closes his eyes, he feels more than just a rational fear that was brushed off because the reality is too terrifying. He sees deaths he could have avoided if he’d been _quicker._ If he’d known.

Somewhere in the hidden nooks and crannies of his TARDIS, there’s a diary that will never have an ending. He doesn’t dare pick up a pen and write what will forever be the last page there himself. His own handwriting would ruin it. There are endings that shouldn’t be told.

Breathing out, he combs back his hair.

“They don’t gnaw through bone,” he just says, grinding his jaw. If there’s one thing he remembers, it’s the skeletons, dead and still talking through coms. In that silent library.

“I think at some point you’re just going to have to face the fact that nobody can know every species in the universe. Not even you.”

The Doctor has no time to note the gentleness in his enemy’s voice. He has no energy left to care much about that, even if the whole point of today was to _find_ whatever corner of the Master’s hearts that could still evoke crumbs of kindness.

“If I don’t, people die.”

“These are already dead. They’re already sand. Let’s just go back, that Big Bang you promised—” the Master says.

The Master _tries_.

The Doctor should suppose it’s something. But he just grinds his jaw tighter and walks further into the darkness. He doesn’t fear it. He supposes he should do that, too, after everything he knows.

The cool air inside the building makes the cuts and scratches on his face and hands itch as much as the sun did. He can sense nothing in there, just the dust, piling. And the ashes of bone, pretending to be sand. He hears footsteps behind him and feels some sort of relief, deep down, that things haven’t changed much. That there’s still someone behind him. Even if it’s who he least expected.

For a second, back there in the entrance, he really didn’t care if he was setting loose the greatest threat to the whole universe, who happened to know where to find a working TARDIS and who would have no trouble breaking into it. He really didn’t.

Relief turns to ash in his throat. This is who he is, the man who left Wilfred Mott to die inside a malfunctioning Nuclear Bolt. The man who would have happily left the Master behind to do as he pleased. All on a whim to move forward no matter what and not face what was _there, then._

No, they are not so different, after all. Just in their methods. The hearts beneath their sternums are the shame shade of black, run on the same rotten blood. They’ve seen the same wars, died for the same causes. Fought for the wrong reasons.

“Aha!” The Master shouts excitedly a couple of steps behind him. “Look what I found!”

The Doctor turns halfway around to see. It’s what he does, he brings people around to follow what he’s intending to accomplish, but he always finds time to wonder at what they see when he’s not looking. He’s forgotten what it was like… to see through someone else’s eyes, and it hasn’t even been that long.

“An old Earth Republic flag…” the Doctor mutters, breathing out, trying to smile. The Master waves it around dramatically like he had just found the world’s most important treasure, then drapes it around his own shoulders. The white in the flag clashes against the striking red of his t-shirt.

“Guess who wins?”

Without waiting a single second, the Master takes the Doctor’s hands and begins rapidly swirling around the room, a giant smirk on his face, like he had indeed won the Super Bowl. Deep inside him there’s still a little of that seven-year-old who sprinted across red fields without a care in the world.

The Doctor barely has time to roll his eyes and struggle free now. He stopped being a child, even in the deepest corners of his soul, too long ago to recall what it felt like. Behind his naive excitement, there’s still ancient worry. Duty.

“You win…” he says reluctantly.

“I win.” The Master lets the Doctor go, but only slightly. He still puts an arm around him, enough that they’re both indecently close. “Now, go on, crack a smile. For me, huh? You look like someone just punched you in the face. This is going to be your lucky winning room, too.”

The Doctor faces him, looks him right in the eye.

“What’s in this for you?” he just asks. Maybe he should have, from the beginning, instead of hoping blindly like he always does. He’s hoped blindly for too long and lost more than he can ever fully grieve. “You didn’t want _saved,_ but I saved you anyway. So now… what?”

“As you so poetically put it, ‘to the stars’. What comes after that was implied as a ‘we’ll figure it out later’ kind of plan. Which I like, because I have no intention of figuring it out now,” the Master says, mostly intending to be truthful. That only confuses the Doctor. “Now, you solve your little mystery, I tag along, and…”

He stops talking. He hasn’t thought about that ‘and’. Which is exactly what the Doctor is asking him about, after all. The Master smiles to himself. The irony of that. They’re seeing eye to eye about the same things, and they’re just as lost about them.

“And then what?” the Master asks the Doctor, soft in his voice and eyes. Only when he means to be does this happen, when he truly means it in both his hearts.

Maybe it’s cheating, to turn the question around on the Doctor. The Master knows his own thoughts on this, he’s made his peace with letting it slide until he can’t anymore and he has to face the inevitable choices that keep creeping up on him. But he just wants to know, for a second, what the Doctor has always thought of all of this.

“You’re my problem. You’ve always been my problem,” the Doctor says. “But even I can’t solve you.”

“I told you,” the Master says, serious. “Some things even you can’t do, sweetheart.”

They leave it at that, because if they didn’t, some things could come out that nobody wants _out_ right now. The Doctor stays behind for a moment now, looking through the darkness in the room like it’s the darkness inside him, while the Master moves forward. Then, he stops, crouches down, and picks something from the sandy floor. He rises back up elegantly in one swift motion, and turns towards the Doctor.

“Not to rain on your mystery parade but…” He shows it to him.

A book. It’s a book.

“Rinea didn’t have any that I saw, remember?” the Master says. “And those guys are doing perfectly well out there.”

The image from the TARDIS monitors burns their brains. Two dead planets, one still blue and green, still thriving, still living. Why? And, most importantly, though, why would futuristic human colonies still bring books on their ships?

The Doctor closes his eyes. The sweat, the heat, this long day. It’s all clouding his judgement. Every book in the universe was already registered somewhere by the 51st century, Anawin and Taheri were both sent out into the darkness by the 28th, took more seven thousand years to arrive. Something’s not adding up. Earth certainly had improved e-books by then, too. Then, why? Nostalgia? Trust in the analogical? Why do those sound so painfully _human_?

“Vashta Nerada breed on wood. What’s made from wood?” the Master says, huffing.

“But it can’t be. It can’t!” the Doctor says. Yet… if it didn’t believe, if he truly thought it an impossibility, he wouldn’t be straightening up his back, getting his screwdriver out, and pointing it at the shadows with a hand that is close to trembling from things that aren’t entirely just exhaustion. “There would be bones. Everywhere…”

Those last words are barely mutters in the cool dimness.

The sounds of his sonic carry throughout the room, into the shadows. It’s the only way to really know, to test a theory that isn’t so much so because _it can’t be._

“They all seem perfectly normal to me,” the Master says. “Then again… outside it’s a scorch. And, statistically…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to.

There should be bodies everywhere. Not just inside.

The Doctor fervently looks at his sonic.

Nothing.

“Any shadow, but not every shadow,” the Doctor reminds him.

“And what will you do?” the Master replies. “Wave that thing around at every single one around here? At every last shadow on the planet?”

It’s ridiculous. One single building would take hours, alone. One city, weeks. The Doctor would never find answers in his lifetimes, if he plans on scanning the entire planet. One thing the Master can say about the Vashta Nerada is that, at least, they leave traces behind.

“If I have to,” it comes out harsher than the Doctor means it. More desperate than he thinks he’s feeling it.

“Why?” the Master asks him calmly. He crouches by the Doctor, taking in a fistful of sand and letting it fall.

Nobody needs to say this, either.

The Doctor always needs to know, to arrive to the final, the right conclusion; to hear the reason why the villain has become such a thing, why they killed everyone or planned to; to get to the point where he’s the last one standing, then save all from extinction or doom or both. He needs to be there, doing what nobody else _can_ or even _wants_ to do. It’s his penance. He might run away, but he stays long enough to do better than he used to.

He just won’t admit to it.

“Here’s a theory you won’t like to explain all of this,” the Master says, changing the subject, when it becomes clear the Doctor isn’t replying.

He keeps playing with the sand. It slips through his fingers like water. Carefully, he lets it out, only to pick it up again.

“Say… they came on the books. But this isn’t like Earth, the darkness wouldn’t be enough. The swarms would have struggled here in this much solar energy. They would have survived, of course—they always do. But… with time, they might have grown to tolerate it a little, enough to exist in the light.”

“Nerada Vashta,” the Doctor says. “But they’d _still_ leave traces behind.”

“At first, maybe. When they were still two species, one growing into the other. But what happens when Nerada Vashta thrives in the abundant sunlight? What happens when they evolve to gnaw through bone?”

The Doctor stares at him in painful silence, not even daring to take a breath. It makes too much sense. The Master stops messing around with the sand. The sand that isn’t sand, but the skeletons they have been looking for.

“Then why aren’t there _any_ swarms left anywhere?” the Doctor asks in a whisper.

“Maybe they ate each other, maybe another carnivorous species did—” The Master frowns. “Is that…?”

Both of them instantly leap to their feet and run towards the nearest window. It’s dirty enough that it’s hard to see, but the column of smoke is unmistakable. And they’ve been alive long enough to know the rumble of a spaceship anywhere, anywhen. The sound of engines roaring calls to them, it’s a cheap and nasty escape when time vortexes are out of bounds, when TARDISes have been locked out of their reach.

Time Lords _run_ to anything that can take them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to the [DW wiki](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Nerada_Vashta), the Nerada Vashta exist in canon as the counterpart of the Vashta Nerada and thrive in the light, not the shadows. 
> 
> I thought I’d honestly just pulled that out of my hat but apparently it’s a legit thing :D


	5. I Will Choose to Be Merciful One Day

The Master and the Doctor almost fly out of the building, through the streets and squares in the city, guided by the noise of a faulty engine and the smell of a smoke column in the distance. Not too far, not too close. Noise, smoke, those are signs of _life._ But their feet burn in the scorching sand when they run, their muscles suffer with each step that drains too much energy out of them. And the Doctor doesn’t care. He can’t. Everything was lost, every person dead, liquefied into sand. The Doctor runs forward as if he still had a coat flapping behind him like a flag, his jacket tugged in his arm, his lifelong friend and enemy running behind him, with an actual flag over his shoulders.

Two spaceships stand in what seems to be an airport of some sorts, entirely buried under dunes of sand outside the main city center, and surrounded by smaller airplanes. Only one of the spaceships is smoking heavily as its engines threaten to give out. They head there at once, hearts beating fast, pounding against their ribcages.

The ramp is down and the entire area smells like fuel, like there has been a flood of it inside, a spillage. Something is wrong with the ship. The Doctor’s footsteps bounce back on the metallic steps.

His breath stops the second he sees.

“ ** _It is time to make the transfer._** ”

“ ** _Secure the ship._** ”

“ ** _We are awakening._** ”

“No! I… I won’t do it.”

The Doctor hesitates for a second. Then, he hears the metal ramp rattle as the Master reaches him, only a few seconds behind. Always a few seconds behind.

“What is it?” the Master asks, his voice rough. “Is it alive? Was I right?”

He grabs the Doctor’s arm, and the Doctor leans onto him. Mutual support at the sight of what is shocking them speechless.

“ ** _Resistance is futile._** ”

“ ** _We are awakening…_** ”

“ ** _…and when we do..._** ”

“ ** _…there’ll be no stopping us._** ”

“ ** _You can’t stop us._** ”

The voices… They’re all the same voice. They all come from the same entity, standing, hunching over the controls of a broken ship. Frail, with scaly skin, a few thin strands of brown hair that cannot cover a round white scalp, in gray, ashen clothes, and trembling like a leaf. But human down to their very core, down to what’s important.

The Doctor can see their mouth moving. But the sounds that come out aren’t human in nature. Or weren’t. Except… the one time that they could only have been that.

“Well, evolution _has_ come a long way,” the Master mutters.

“Shhhh…” the Doctor whispers.

He takes a couple of steps forward, so slowly it hardly registers on the metal flooring. His jacket falls onto the floor.

Around them, all over the ship, there’s silver containers. Bio capsules where anything that was alive could fester. An entire civilization could rise if first kept safe, genetically, in there. Colonies use those sorts of capsules to preserve genetic components during space travel. It ensures the survival of broadly _anything._

“I won’t do it, I won’t do it…” whimpers the human. It’s the second only time that their real voice emerges from the whirlpool of noise. It comes out weak, defiant, and mostly… already fading, because of the single effort it takes to say it. To put it out against the myriad of confusing, alien entities that escape them the rest of the time.

When the Doctor finally reaches them, places a gentle hand on their shoulder, the human flinches so hard his hearts shiver in his chest, and they crumble on the spot. He has to hold them upright.

“Hello,” he says, softly as he can. “I’m the Doctor.”

“ ** _Doctor!_** ”

“ ** _…that name…_** ”

“ ** _The Doctor…_** ”

“Help me…” the human just mutters. They can barely turn in his arms, and when they do, he can see their eyes are all black, taken over by something _else._ Something uncontrollable that for some reason they are still keeping at bay. But for how long will they manage it?

“What’s happened to you?” he asks.

“ ** _You’re too late_**.”

“ ** _This time, you’re too late._** ”

“They… took me,” the human mutters.

“They shouldn’t be able to do that…” the Doctor says. “Not yet.”

“If they could take over dead hosts when they were still the original species,” the Master says. He hasn’t moved from where he is, “who says they couldn’t take over living ones now?”

“ ** _We… evolved,_** ” echo the voices.

“ ** _Through time we became Other_**.”

“ ** _We ate in the shadows until we could eat in the light_**.”

“ ** _But the humans began to die out, and the trees withered_**.”

“ ** _And so did we, Doctor_**.”

The swarm weaves a tale in short, few words. A tale that every being in this ship is living right now, in small patches of the same planet. In different times of the same moment.

“ ** _We took a human to live on_**.”

“ ** _And we became this human_**.”

“ ** _They will take us away_**.”

“ ** _To start again_**.”

“A whole new world,” the Master says. “They’re going to colonize elsewhere.”

“ ** _Everywhere_**.”

The voices keep talking, a swarm of too many thoughts at once. They are too many to drown out and too many to single out. But they’re getting louder every second, and now the human is losing consciousness in the Doctor’s arms.

He glances apprehensively at the Master.

“They can’t go anywhere,” the Master says, as if that were any consolation. “The ship’s damaged.”

“They don’t need the ship,” the Doctor replies. He understands now. “The capsules themselves will… find their programmed destination, when the swarm rises. On long interstellar trips, colony cruisers bring them onboard for unity, comfort. But…” He looks down on the human’s face. They’re still conscious. Sweat has begun to cover their forehead. His voice softens. “They were probably trying to blow the ship up to stop this.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah…”

How long will this one human have succeeded to stop the masterplan of a patient race? How long have they already managed to stop it through time?

The Doctor gently supports the still breathing human against the controls and sits by them. Such a struggle, for how many years? No human is meant to bear it, not without a clouding in their minds so that the suffering is lessened. There is youth in their skin still, yet… the ancient sound of their voice says more against youth than anything else. So does their choice to continue fighting against full colonization. Invasion. Humans did never like to be conquered.

_For how many centuries did you walk alone, waiting through exhaustion? For how many centuries have you been fending them off?_ He wonders.

He takes the hand of this one human who could have never stopped them. The Nerada Vashta have gorged two colonies until they’re nothing but sand, and they planned well enough ahead to never run out. To have an escape plan to Rinea. And from then on… to the rest of the universe. Rinea is the most modern, the most advanced. Their evolution has only begun.

Terror pools within him. It falls onto him now. It always does. But is it always this hard? This… lonely? Does he always have a gentle, brave soul in his arms to keep from death? Does he always have to choose from saving a worthy martyr who should live out the rest of their days happily somewhere and the future of who knows how many others out there in the universe, in the future?

It doesn’t help to know that the answer to that is yes. It doesn’t help to know that he normally knows how to choose between the two, even if it hurts. Even when it hurts too much.

When the swarm finally unlocks out of the human’s mind into the bio capsules, it’s over. So what will the great Doctor of the stories do to stop it, with all the power at his disposal?

“I’m sorry…” he says wetly to the human whose life hangs on a thread which he holds between slippery fingers. “I’m so sorry.”

Should he try and soothe the swarm telepathically? Would they even listen to him enough to _stop,_ long enough for him to come up with a plan? And what plan would that be? Get on the other ship, supposing it can fly, and then blow this one up once he’s airborne, killing the swarm and the human as he goes?

Should he simply kill the channel, thus killing the entire race and stopping them from ever reaching the bio containers? At least that way he would make sure the human would have a gentle death.

There is no right choice, no choice that makes him win. _It’s the same as it was with Wilfred_ , he realizes. He ran because if he didn’t, he would have fulfilled the prophecy and died. If he’d stayed, he would have lost the Master, lost himself in a failed regeneration that ended up killing him, but saved Wilfred. Choices. It’s all about the choices and why he makes them.

He has to make another one now. Right here.

In a ship that might burn up anyway, soon. If someone sets a spark, with the three of them inside it, and a swarm that might otherwise escape. _Yes,_ he decides. After all, he has always been good at making things _burn._

Whatever is going on in the Doctor’s head, the Master sees it. If there is a choice to be made, he can always see it. Normally, he would run away from it, as fast as he could. As far away as possible. But he hasn’t. He might be glued to the same spot as when he came in, as cowardly as he’s ever been, but he hasn’t _left._ He keeps asking himself what choice he could possibly make, if he was right there, only a few steps away, if it was him holding a dying hero in his arms. If it was in his hands to change this.

“ ** _You’re too late_** ,” the voices keep saying, victorious. In a loop that never ends.

“ ** _Too late_** …”

Normally, it would be him, saying that out loud to the Doctor, bringing the ultimatum to him on a silver platter. Watching him crumble like the sky when the Daleks come in their ships to search and destroy.

_Normally normally normally normally._

The Doctor’s song is ending. There are echoes of it all over the universe. In every head that can hear it while it’s still being sung.

That face of his, turning ancient and wrung and tired; his eyes, wrinkled and old when he thinks nobody is paying attention to anything but his silly grin; and his desperation when he _begged_ and _ordered_ the Master not to die.

This new silence—and the prospect of a future with it—has affected them both enough to stop them running from their pasts and their dilemmas.

And it’s so easy, to look through the Doctor’s eyes right now, almost tearing up at foreign suffering, and be the Master of solutions, for once.

It’s a funny answer to his question. A very funny answer. And the opposite to the one he thought he’d find. _Who am I?_ That never has a fixed answer, the self is always changing as one’s life does, like a sail-less ship drifting on a quiet ocean. But _who do I want to be_?... It’s the self’s own choices that make the waves for the ship’s course to be set somewhere.

The Master takes one step.

Immediate action has always been their problem, his and the Doctor’s. They rush in, trying to _do_ something quick enough so that they can go even quicker and never look back. The Doctor stays long enough to see if it worked, the Master leaves with the first sign of peace, so he can remember the chaos that brought him _fulfillment._

He takes another step.

All these years, he’s felt exactly like the human, right there, must. Trapped inside his own head, just trying to run either towards or from his choices, never knowing which of the two he was really doing. And, ironically, this one human, alone and losing, is doing far better at it than he ever was. Ironically, too, the Master knows what the human wants.

For it to stop. For someone else to take care of it so they can finally _rest._ What else can there be, after so many years, centuries, of suffering without end?

He looks right at the Doctor now and it stands between them, the memory of the Master in the Doctor’s arms for the first time, able to regenerate but refusing to, because the noise was going to finally be gone without him having to do anything after. _I win,_ he’d said. _The drumming. Will it stop?_ , he’d asked. All he’d wanted was the sweet release of death. Because getting up, after, and having to face a silent world that demanded him to better himself was worse than noise. It brought guilt, and shame, and it took _time_ out of him.

This one human in the midst of a dead planet is better than him. They deserve rest. Not release from betterment, but well-earned rest after eons of stopping interplanetary genocide. There is no life for such a tortured mind. And there is no time, either, to fix the effects of that torture before the swarm is released.

The only solution is the one the Doctor can never take. Because direct violence always makes him look away, or wait until the last possible second. They don’t have that kind of time.

The Master smirks to himself, aware that in doing this very thing, he’ll fail his test, and he just… rushes towards the human. Knees scrape against metal, and he has to physically make his way _in._

“What are you doing?” the Doctor asks at first, not understanding. But when the Master doesn’t move away, when he doesn’t reply, his hands reaching for the human’s temples, his eyes closing— “No! What are you doing?!”

It’s too quick. The tendrils of life, of struggle… loosen in the Master’s skillful mind. And the human goes entirely limp in the Doctor’s arms.

The last of the voices fades with it.

“ ** _… aaaargh…_** ”

“What did you just do?” he hisses. “They were the last.”

“They were running out of time.”

The Master rises from the floor. The Doctor remains there, next to a human that now is no more. But there is peace on their face. Well-earned peace.

He looks menacing like that, the Master. A killer, again. An arsonist, a killer. Red in the metal beast of the ship. The Doctor glares at him, blaming himself for thinking he would ever change. The Master almost smiles. Ironic, all of it. That it came to this. That he made the one choice that the Doctor would never accept as _good,_ even if it in his hearts that’s all he ever meant by it. A selfless action that brought less pain than there already was before.

“Now the swarm is gone,” he says, offering the Doctor his dirty hand to hold as he gets up from the metal floor. “You’re welcome.”

The Doctor continues to glare at him.

“I thought…”

“I know what you thought.” The Master doesn’t move his hand away. “A couple of minutes more and you would have had an armada of flying bio containers with a swarm of carnivores, heading for the nearest planet. And then what?”

“It wasn’t your choice to make.”

“And was it yours?” the Master asks. Menacing, ever so menacing. Baring his teeth, like the antihero that is about to pounce. “Tell me, Doctor. Who ever said you were the only one who _could_ make them? Who gave you the authority?” He lets out his air. “When time runs out, it’s not just you that will stand there and watch. Remember that.”

His hand still hovers between them. His head cocks in its direction. His eyes say ‘just take it, our history is too complicated for you not to now’.

The Doctor does, however reluctantly, and they both stand in the quiet ship now. It still smells like fuel. It has piled up somewhere in a pool of black.

Sometime after, looking at it, they both decide that the best course of action, just in case, would be to blow it up from the TARDIS, since the planet is dead regardless and nothing could ever grow in it with so much sand and sun everywhere.

“No plants, no animals. No life,” the Doctor agrees. “And you just took out the last remainder there was of it.”

The Master stares at him. Whatever had been built, unstably or not, between them… has definitely been demolished now. Their trip has ended the same way it started. And the Doctor doesn’t care, knowing that it was the Master’s conscious _choice_ to end it in time, to end it humanely. All he cares about is his morals. And the fact that to him it was a selfish action. The Master stares at him and thinks that, after so long, after the betrayals and the games, it doesn’t matter.

“Will your screwdriver even work at such a distance?” he asks, laughing.

The Doctor puts his hands in his pockets, despite the terrible heat, and sighs.

“I’ll make sure to point straight.”

“You don’t ever do anything straight. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”

After that, they set off to salvage what they can from the ship, because it would be a bit of a waste not to, and set the bio containers to never open. Just in case. Then they just… leave the ship and the body of the human who was brave until the end.

At this moment, there is little point in playing games or pretending not to know the rules of them.

“So, I assume this is it. Will you keep me prisoner now? Do I get a pretty little cell in your pretty little box? With blue bars and blue covers on the stone bench that’ll be my bed?”

The fact that the Master is asking sarcastically but pretty much willingly accepting a possible ‘yes’ makes the Doctor frown. He shakes his head.

“Has this ever happened to your pets?” the Master asks. “Have they ever gotten out of control enough for you to have to…?”

“If that ever happened, memory wipe.” Of course, because the Doctor always loves them too much to put them through interplanetary prison. “But that wouldn’t work, not on you.” the Doctor says, seriously, still frowning.

For four heartbeats, they’re quiet, standing between two spaceships. One of which will never fly again. What stands between them is greater than any of that. If the Doctor’s not keeping him prisoner, even thinking what he thinks of him, then…

“Come with me.” the Master just says.

“What?” the Doctor says, utterly taken aback.

“I won’t follow you,” the Master says. “Not into another system to do what you do. It’s not my style.” He laughs. “And it’s not like you’d allow that, given… well, this. I don’t like your rules, and if you turn me into another one of your pets—and that’s what I’d be, in that TARDIS—I’d have to follow them, too. So come with me.”

Nothing, ever, has shocked the Doctor’s core like this, rocked his world, his baggage, his understanding of himself, like this. He would have never expected this offer from the Master. Not after the many, many times when he got the opposite from it. The animosity, the fighting, the almost dying. They were made to chase each other.

And yet… once, they’d stood on old rusty cliffs together, watching the double sunset, and giggling about someone else. Because giggling about each other sounded preposterous at the time. It sounded scary to even think about it. They’d run, hand-in-hand, caring little about breaking arms or noses if they fell. And they’d fallen asleep together, foreheads sweaty in the Gallifreyan heat of the night. Because together was always better than alone. Even for the eternal Time Lords, condemned to watch everybody else die.

They’ve both been _the last,_ on opposing sides of the universe, running away from each other, into each other. Out of madness into a new chaos. Maybe this is the final one, joining sides. Running _together._ Squarely facing death, as one. Getting on a ship and just… running. Away. Into the future, past. Anywhere in time and space that could fit them both. The Last of the Time Lords.

The Doctor, who cannot travel alone. And the Master, who always has.

“We could travel the stars,” the Master continues. “It would be my honor, to have the privilege of seeing the whole of time and space with you.” Their eyes meet. The Doctor doesn’t think he’s ever seen the Master trying to be convincing. Not like this, not while being… gentle at the same time. He somehow still looks like that child the Doctor loved, so very long ago—that child he sometimes still remembers at night, when he can’t sleep and the ghosts of his past sit on his chest. “Every star in the universe. As we once said we would.”

Isn’t that all the Doctor has ever wanted, deep into his hearts, there where he never dares peek?

“We were kids,” he barely manages to say.

“Time Lords… We’re never kids.”

The Doctor doesn’t say anything.

If he flies off into the sunsets with him, now, how much of what he’s stood for for years just goes away in the wind? How much of the Doctor will get lost in translation? Will he still be the Doctor, if he abandons everything to follow his enemy across the stars, to _see_ the stars with him?

They aren’t kids anymore. And Gallifrey burned because he burned it. And only hours ago, he left a very good man behind on Earth, to follow his enemy across green grass and save his life.

He saved it. Then his enemy ended another, saving millions as he did.

The Doctor’s song is still ending. It’s in his hands to choose how.

“You’ll let me go, then?” the Master asks softly.

The Doctor nods. It’s a double question. And a double answer.

_I don’t own you, I won’t cage you._ Never, in these many years of confrontation that led nowhere, has the Doctor even tried to lock him up. Either because it can’t be done or because he cannot be the one to do it, the Doctor will not. His choice has been made. Even more so, it has been voiced.

But what will he choose to do now, afterwards? What will the time traveler do with the lives he’s left behind, if he’s supposed to be letting go now of the one that he’s chased after?

Together, he and the Master climb into the second spaceship and get it ready for takeoff. It’s simple human machinery, so it cannot travel in time, but it’ll be enough to go to another galaxy, maybe somewhere where the technology already exists. That’s in the Master’s hands. In a way, the Doctor’s stranding him by doing this and not caging him in his TARDIS. But the Master has chosen it for a reason.

Together, they sit on the rusty floor and work on wires and buttons, salvaging the salvage from the other ship into something that will improve the conditions of this one. They fix it slowly, taking their time, aware of what these precious moments are, even if they’re not speaking of it.

A final act of their union is now ending. Because they are too similar and too different, and the last thing they need is each other. What they could want… is another story entirely.

Once the last piece of the giant puzzle is set, their decisions hover in midair, and the Master stands by the controls, his back turned to them.

“I can only guess that I will see you around, Doctor,” he says. “After all, it is inevitable. The question is when.”

The Doctor leans on the curved wall of the ship.

“It is a very good question, isn’t it?”

“Does it ever have an answer, I wonder? Don’t you ever want it so much you’d do anything just to have it?”

“I live for the day when I won’t,” the Doctor says. Oftentimes, having the answers… is worse. That diary in his TARDIS, all those times he’s almost been tempted into looking at it… He’d rather not know his future.

“Those puny little humans… Such short unimportant lives. But they might really be one of the few species in the universe that isn’t enslaved to time, as we are.”

“They’re enslaved to its passage, to their day-by-day and having too many recent memories.”

“And then they’re gone. Then it’s all gone.” The Master sighs and looks him in the eye with an intensity that could almost polish stone. “I knew you’d show, every single time that I’ve … called to you. Every single time. I know you. But I wonder what I would do if I knew I would never see you again. I wonder many things…”

His eyes, changing, still changing. Even now. The Doctor can only ask himself what that man knows, what he’s heard. If the songs of the Ood have really traveled all the way to the mind of the Master. And if he’s known how to interpret them.

From one of his pockets, the Master gets a blue piece of something and throws it to the Doctor.

“Chunk of the TARDIS,” he explains. “Had to ensure my way out, in case…”

The Doctor just nods. He rubs the little piece of his TARDIS, once discarded in the ample entrance of it, between his fingers. Any other version of the Master he once thought he knew so well wouldn’t have given this back to him. That Master would have simply kept it in his pocket, safe and sound, and flown silently back into space and… well, eventually, also time. And the Doctor’s just so tired of thinking about all those Masters who fought him and this Master who, for some reason, isn’t. Hasn’t. And… won’t?

He takes the Master’s hand and gives it back.

“Grow your own. You’ll need it.”

Stranding a Time Lord anywhere in space without a means of time travel is an experience he doesn’t wish on anyone, not even he who was the worst of his enemies. The one who unraveled him the most. The one who’s now offering peace.

The Master’s eyes burn across the room into his own.

“It’ll take time, but…” the Doctor says.

“Yeah,” the Master says, almost laughing. “I’ve got time.”

His eyes are still burning through the Doctor’s, asking…, _do_ you _have time, Doctor?_

If he asked that out loud, the Doctor wonders what he’d say. If he’d tell the truth, about going back. About his final death, prophesized. Four knocks. Nuclear bolt. He will absorb as much as he can, then he’ll die and begin regenerating, but the nuclear energy will still come at him and kill him again, before he can finish the regeneration. Maybe the Master already knows. The Nuclear Bolt is his, after all.

“Why are you doing this?” the Master asks him. “I thought…”

“I know what you thought,” the Doctor says, almost smiling. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Where are you going, then?” the Master asks.

Maybe he knows. This insistence… it is typical of him. Bothersome, annoying. It gets to anyone. And it’s… endearing, in a way. It’s background noise to the Doctor, after so long. He almost loses to the smile creeping up on his face.

“Back,” he says, sniffling distractedly. “I’m going back.”

_To my death,_ he thinks.

“Why?” the Master says. He knows. Of course he knows. Maybe before the Doctor himself knew.

“Because even you saw what had to be done. And did it,” the Doctor says. His face, his voice, still refuse to be tamed by emotion. “And I stood by, watching.”

And if he goes back, then at least there it’ll all come flooding back, all of the good things that make him the Doctor when everybody’s looking, when he’s alone. All the time. His humanity, his Earth, his family. It doesn’t matter who’s gone and from where. It’s all there, in the latent turn of that beautiful planet. And he needs to go back to make it right, to stop being one heartbeat away from the Time Lord that makes all the wrong choices.

If he goes back, at least he can still die as someone who refused to be so hypocritical that he’d even try to hate the Master for his actions, when he’s done worse. When he’s dreamed of doing worse for his own good.

He left Wilfred behind and ran… and ran. And his hearts ache with longing to run again, hand in hand with his enemy that has never been just that. His enemy that right now is everything but just that.

“Come with me, Doctor,” the Master offers softly.

“I can’t.” He leans his head against the wall and actually, finally smiles. “All these years, I thought you’d never ask. I thought _I_ would.”

“Well, it kind of does sound like you to.”

“I know, right?” He sniffles again. There are no tears, but there could be. Soon. “I can’t come with you. But I can let you go. And I’m not even going to ask where you’re going. Or when. Or to do what.”

Just more running, in opposite directions, as if a higher power had dictated it some time in the past and they were just following roads. _You solve your little mystery, I tag along, and…_ the Master had said. This is their ‘and’, after all. No ending. No closure. Always moving forward.

“You will see,” the Master says now. And the Doctor hears hope in his voice. He also never once thought he’d hear that there. “Someday. But I do wish you’d ask.”

Even if the Doctor isn’t going to, the Master does wish with all of his might that he would. Just to say it out loud, for once. All these years, it’s all been a very long game of difference, of chasing each other. Cat and mouse, mouse and cat.

It should have all been a game of _Time Lord._ Of a hand, seeking another hand in the dark, scary night. In the astounding terrifying sight of the silent universe.

The Doctor is a traveler who wasn’t warped for evil like the Master was, who fought injustice from within and ran away to then fight it everywhere else he went, who once he saw the influence of Time Lord society in himself tried to stop it enough to go on being as fair as he could, and who even on the brink of loneliness and death is still intent on a kindness that’s almost penitence. The Master has no clue how that feels, if it will help him reconcile himself with the lack of noise in his head and the person inside him that doesn’t hunger for the war that would bring him that sound, but the Doctor has stayed sane all these years for a reason. Mercy, kindness, insistence. Repentance.

It's not time to _stand_ with the Doctor.

It’s time to try and be a little like what the Doctor himself aspires to be.

Merciful, kind, insistent. Repenting.

Time to become acquainted with his own silence. With what it means.

He only just wishes, selfishly, that the Doctor would _ask_ why. Where he’s going. And why he wants him there, the Doctor. His Doctor.

But he’s not going to. The Doctor may ask questions, but never the ones that are truly important. And these will solve no mysteries, bring peace to no planet. These are just the questions that have always stood between them. The ones making them Doctor and Master, Master and Doctor. The Last of the Time Lords. Two tired people about to run in opposite directions again, hoping. Always hoping. One hoping enough for the other.

_Hasn’t it always been this way?_

One, always looking avidly at the other.

One, always trusting the other would follow.

Maybe the other was, too, when one couldn’t possibly notice.

“I’ve got to go now,” the Doctor says. He stays long enough to see his matters concluded, then he leaves. The Doctor always leaves. Getting a goodbye from him is— _should be—_ enough. It’s never the end, is it? Goodbyes are never the end with time travelers. But it feels like it now. Because he’s going _back._

The Master gazes into his eyes, even across the distance between them. He smirks for him.

“Shoot straight,” he says.

The Doctor graces him with half a smile, leans forward to pick up his jacket, and then he just… turns around to leave.

The Master leans back on the controls and sighs, looking at him go. The shift of his shoulders when he walks this slowly, this desperately, delaying it all until the very last second. He can hear it, the song, still going, still forever stirring sides of him he always knew existed but always pretended were dormant. Then he just turns to face the controls and begins tapping at them to take off into the sunsets.

He doesn’t see, because he can’t, that the Doctor’s step catches, right before the floor swallows him on the way down the ramp. He turns ever so slightly and catches the last glimpse of the Master in his red t-shirt, leaning forward to see the words on the controls and find the right combinations he needs to fly. It’s not harder to maneuver than a TARDIS, but all aircraft take time to get used to. The Doctor smiles to himself at the sight of those hands, almost flying already over the controls, finding what they need. All that anxiety, that energy… coming out of his hands, and the corner of his lips, the slight tremor of his cheeks. The Master, unabridged.

The Doctor turns back and takes the final steps down the ramp, leaving the Master behind.

Nine hundred years… Maybe, if he survives this, the Doctor will one day finally tell the Master that he’s always looked as mighty as a star to him when he frowns over something he’s in the middle of solving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Search and destroy” is in reference to _Hellsing Ultimate_.


	6. Epilogue—At the Hotel of the Dead

Attitude. After so long, even he knows that’s not the right thing to ask of a person who has just lost someone. But it just comes out of him. If he stops, for a single second, the both of them will just sit down on the floor of the TARDIS, and he’ll have nothing to say to her. Not even sorry. He never did like that funny little man. He could never even remember what he did for a living. In the Doctor’s head, all Danny Pink did was run around in literal circles. Around Clara.

 _P.E., you’d better be here,_ he thinks.

Clara is the only one who could ever run circles around the literal universe.

And he’s just asked her for attitude in the face of death.

“Where are we?” she asks.

He assumes an answer should be in order, but it’s too early to tell anybody anything when they’ve traveled because of Clara through the telepathic interface of the TARDIS. And it’s… peaceful. In excess. He doesn’t like it when things are, he can hear his own thoughts getting louder. Usually, there’s always noise and activity in the outside world to drown those out.

“Little eternal flame.” He points at a little urn between two granite columns where the flame in question is contained. It remains perfectly still, which is contradictory, given the circumstances of burning fire. Atop it, a number and a letter have been fashioned into a purple italics excuse for a company emblem. “Cute little logo.”

“3W?” Clara asks.

“Could be anything. World, Words, Women? Wonderful Willy Wonka?”

At least that makes her smile. He didn’t think that could ever be achieved again, not judging solely by the look on her face, earlier, standing that close to lava. Her threat would have stood for a thousand years. And yet all he’s done is overlook that and take her here.

To a place that has a plaque. A plaque with a slogan carved in granite.

“I’d take that…” he mutters as he reads the slogan. “ _Rest In Peace, We Promise_.”

“He must be near, then,” Clara says, her spirits a little less low. “He has to be, right?”

Anybody would have found hope in their heart, after reading that. It’s no wonder, if they’ve tried to travel to literal hell—or wherever souls go after dying—and the first thing they’ve run into is the one sentence that may confirm this place is death-related. 

Plus, it’s nice. Objectively. With big windows on the walls that open to a green garden where a fountain runs on and on, the sound of its water creating the most wonderful ambiance. Indoors, the wallpaper emulates it perfectly through visual stimuli, in pastel colors and spiral patterns. Even the carpet beneath their feet, a beautiful and vibrant shade between deep orange and red, helps tie together the feeling of utter _niceness._

There’s a murmur getting closer, then footsteps.

A small crowd passes the corner. Men, dressed in black and white suits, talking among themselves. Their attire seems strangely out of place, and at the same time oddly familiar to the Doctor. They nod at him and Clara, before continuing their conversation.

“Dumfries, it’s time for tea! Do we really have to go back to your bedroom?”

“We _are_ going back to my bedroom. You can wait in the garden for me, I don’t mind.”

A couple of them laugh.

“Doctor,” Clara mutters, eyes open. “Who are these people? Did I get it wrong?”

“No,” he says. He places his hand in the small of her back, urging her not to stick to one small corner of the corridor and move on. “If Danny’s somewhere, I very much doubt he’ll be there alone.” He even manages a tense smile at her. Because he must. “We’ll find him, let’s go.”

“But… these people aren’t _dead._ ” Her voice breaks at the last word. His hand forgets that it’s supposed to be touching her back.

“I know,” he just says.

The only thing he can think of doing—the only thing he’s ever really been any good at doing—is to keep walking on and make sure she’s following.

A few corridors later, the procession of people has not started. They all seem equally lively, going places, talking to each other with different levels of closeness. Some seem to be friends, some seem to be… varying dynamics of other things. Some just wander alone, their faces shaped into expressions he knows too well from his own past.

Later on, a happy bunch of prison guards in their uniforms pace the corridor together, laughing about some joke. They must be the security guards, then. There’s a woman with them, in a white tank top. She stares at him for a moment. It’s just a moment, but he’s sure, for as long as the moment lasts, that he knows her. She even nods at him, too, and there’s something in her eyes that he can’t possibly just be seeing for the first time.

He stops moving.

“Doctor?” Clara asks him when the woman and her friends have disappeared into the back of the corridor.

“Fine,” he says, resuming his strolling.

He could have _sworn_ that was—

But it’s impossible, isn’t it? Even if he’s right, and they’re where they should be. Why would Danny Pink share a resting place, of all people, with Lucy Saxon?

No, he must have just… mistaken her for someone else. There are, after all, many people here.

A song begins to play in the loudspeakers somewhere. Bach’s _Air_. It, too, makes the corridor beautiful, stretching and stretching, turning into another one, somehow always with windows that open to a garden. They look like different corridors, in the same shade of the same red carpet, and it looks like it’s a different part of the same garden, maybe different gardens at times. Labyrinthine, this place.

Four people turn up next. It’s always four, isn’t it?

Their names are somewhere inside him, as every name is. Lost to time and an oblivion that will one day come. But their faces… those he could never forget. Because he was there, the moment—the exact second—they ceased to _be._

Clara’s hand tightens around his. Or his around hers. He no longer knows if the order even matters.

A man that had perished in the hands of a Weeping Angel, trying still to protect him from the future that River Song would deliver to him.

“If he’s here… will he know me still? Will he… remember?” Clara whispers. But the Doctor can’t hear her.

A woman, only just twenty, sucked into space to die because the Doctor was too slow to figure out what was going on, too reticent to believe in old gods.

A girl, trying to do something worthwhile, killed because nobody thought her important enough to listen. Because he was busy with something else. She holds an ice cream cone in her hands now and giggles along with the other two.

The Doctor’s breath catches. She died, too, screaming ‘ice cream’ in a loop.

“I think…” he says to Clara. “I think so, yes.”

The girl eyes him carefully now, probably wondering who he is. And, if she knows the answer to that, probably asking herself if Clara will end up the same way Donna Noble did.

It’s almost as if they’d planned it.

As if a mechanism had been activated, and all these people had just been an anticipated preview. To memories old forgotten and feelings he didn’t want to have. But, for the sake of Clara, who he pretends for more often than not, he has to act like it’s just coincidence.

Steps that precede other steps.

A person just walking slower than others.

Danny Pink turns the next corner. And the Doctor isn’t sure whose heart stops in whose chest for the following millisecond, to then race like a wild horse when Clara leaps into the air and runs to him.

She dashes into his arms, almost knocking him to the floor, like she can’t actually believe it. Neither can he, from the Doctor’s perspective. Danny’s eyes are as dead as he should be—as he _is._

“Are you dead?” he asks her. “Please tell me you’re not dead…”

“No,” she says, grinning. And there she is, the girl who travels the stars for fun, for business, and for pleasure all at once. The boss of the TARDIS and the Doctor, when no one’s looking. All excitement and rage at the same time, if the world lets her. Attitude, finally. “Why would I be dead? That’s just… wrong. I came with the Doctor to find you.”

“You have to be dead,” Danny says. He holds her steady in his arms so he can look at her properly. Tell her with his eyes as well as his voice. “To be here.”

She gazes into them, trying to process those words. The Doctor knows it’s hard to have to do this twice in the same day.

“But… you’re not,” she says. “You’re here.”

His face sinks for a second. A man who’s been to war and dealt with children for a living, and this discussion is what finally breaks him. The Doctor should finally learn to treat him better from now on, he might actually deserve it.

“Danny, you’re _here_ ,” Clara insists. “We can take you back home now.”

Death is so hard for humans to deal with, the Doctor can’t even judge her, not even slightly, for trying. Twice, thrice. As many times as she can. She would have robbed him of everything he has, which is not much, to have Danny back. Death makes humans too desperate.

And the Doctor stands by in his immortal casing that dies but never truly _leaves,_ hoping with all his might that her trying might one day succeed.

Danny continues looking at her, losing her all over again with each passing second. Because he knows something neither Clara nor the Doctor do. He must. Otherwise, he’d be kissing her, celebrating prematurely, like humans fancy so much. He’d be making preparations with her. Talking of things they’d never go through with. Instead, he just looks like Danny, sad and broken. Like a man who just died and is aware of it.

“Death is not an end, but we can we help with that,” says a voice. “Ever since its foundation, here at 3W we have been working hard to find a better life for the deceased.” Someone else emerges from the corner as well—it’s always the corner—, dressed entirely in black, except for a red bow in her hat and the cherry lipstick on her lips. “At 3W, afterlife means aftercare.”

“We’re okay, thank you,” Clara says dismissively, as one might to somebody working in a shop when they’re asking in the worst possible moment. “We’re just taking him home.”

“Sorry, but he’s dead,” the newcomer says. “He can only live here. Outside these walls… they all crumble into dust. That’s where we come in.”

Around them, people keep walking past the corner, past them. People the Doctor recognizes and doesn’t but feels certain familiarity toward. Some nod to him, even smile, as if they knew him. Or as if they were just… that polite. Or looking for connection.

He faces the newcomer.

“Who are you?”

“Mobile Intelligent Systems Interface. Missy, for short. I am a multi-function, interactive welcome-droid.” She smiles pleasantly. “I help people become acquainted with…” She gestures around her with both arms. “All of this.”

“She helps out with the situation we’re all in,” Danny says, to everybody’s surprise.

She winks at Danny appreciatively.

“O…kay,” the Doctor says. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “Well, we—we sort of need someone to help someone _else_ —him—transition into the whole getting _out_ bit instead. Anybody here that can do that?”

“Sorry,” Missy says in a very robotic voice. “Does. Not. Compute.”

“I don’t care,” Clara whispers angrily to the Doctor. “I’ll get him out on my own, I’ll—”

The Doctor frowns in everybody’s general direction.

“I need to speak to whoever’s in charge here,” he says calmly.

“I _am_ in charge,” Missy says.

“Well,” the Doctor replies, getting a little impatient. He does not handle artificial intelligence well. Not after the Cybermen. Or, generally, anything that tries to be alive but isn’t. Although, truth be told, alive is a bit of a stretchy definition. “Who’s in charge of you, then?”

“I’m in charge of me,” she says, like it’s obvious.

“Well, who repairs you?” he asks again. There has to be something here he’s asking wrong or _not_ asking. He has heard of androids who don’t take the whole not-alive topic very nicely, so he tries again. “Who _maintains_ you?”

He’s feeling quite proud of his specificity when Missy beams at him, blinking rather … humanly. Androids and the like don’t tend to have human eyelashes. What would they need them for? Why would a Mobile Interface need eyelashes?

“I am maintained by my heart,” she says, gently taking his hand and guiding it against her face, his fingers so very up close and personal to her jawline, tucked away under her ear, his thumb resting just over her cheekbone.

He feels it, then, against the tips of his fingers. Something that makes him stop thinking. Barely a faded ghost.

To hell with impossibilities. To hell with how.

He just really doesn’t want to believe it’s happening. Beneath his fingers, tucked away under his left hand… Fluttering alive, still. It’s been two bodies since he actively thought about it. Much.

Sometimes he still dreams of it. He always will.

She grins at him now. Something honest and real that doesn’t hide anything below its surface. He can feel everything below those fingers. He can feel everything going on in his chest, echoing that very fluttering, that ghost of the past. The same sound, the same vibration.

“Hello, you silly sausage,” she finally says.

“Two hearts,” the Doctor manages. The words that take the most effort. Because they hold the most meaning.

She nods.

“And both of them yours, sweetheart.”

The Doctor’s mouth has, at some point in the last twenty seconds, become unbearably dry.

“Were you always this… forward about it?” he asks.

“Were you always this shy about it?” she rebukes.

Missy reaches out to cup his face as well. Older than she remembers. Still as beautiful. She would have loved him in any shape. It’s taken her two bodies to fully realize that, to fully be able to _say_ it inside her head without wanting to run away from it, without locking it inside both her hearts like the darkest secret.

He can feel her inside his mind, then, for the briefest of seconds—the briefest of touches. No noise, still. And the clarity of her… astonishes him.

_I told you I’d be different, and I am. And so are you. You’ve… changed so much, Doctor. But some things never will, you still can’t believe me when I call you ‘sweetheart’._

“Doctor… what’s going on?” Clara asks him. She hasn’t let go of Danny. “Can we go now? Please…”

“Mind-melt,” Missy tells her. “Will take him a while. Always does.” She turns back to the Doctor and his eyes, those eyes that have changed color and shape over the regenerations and yet are still so very Doctor. Old and young. Wise and silly. The last time she saw them… she feared never seeing them again. “You lived, then?”

His right hand covers the one that’s cupping his own face.

 _They sang to me, Master. They sang older songs than you could possibly believe. They sang until I slept… and then I woke up a new man. I have lived two full lives since. And none compared to who I was when you last saw me. I remember._ _The universe knows to be silent, when the Ood sing._

Behind those words, there’s a story. Of people that are gone. Not dead, gone. Sometimes, that can be sadder. Missy sees it in his mind, plucks it slowly from the walls of his consciousness and lets the memories dance into her own, closing her eyes.

When she lets go, dropping the hand that connects both their selves and minds, he feels emptier. Again, it only lasts a second. There is too much going on in the mind of him for it to last more.

“Alright, then,” he tells her. “Danny Pink. Anything that can be done about him? What is this place, anyway?”

“I keep them comfortable. Since I started remembering all those _names_ … It was the least I could do. What you would have done—” Missy smiles sadly. “If you’d known how.”

The Doctor looks at her now like he used to, not fearing being seen. She was always the brighter mind out of the two of them, it was a pity, truly, that for the most part it got clouded by a noise that didn’t ever let her see anything past war and death. He used to look at her like she was the most beautiful sun, and he hid it in the darkest corners of his mind, because he didn’t understand it at first and, with time, he’d just feared the person she became. Feared the person he might grow up becoming, if he kept on looking at her like that.

“Something lives on, Doctor. Look at him,” Missy says.

Danny’s still standing there, next to Clara, clinging on to her absentmindedly. Fingers intertwined, shoulders brushing against each other. Something hangs in the air and the Doctor only says its name when it doesn’t apply to himself.

“It lives on, but only here. Some have tried to leave. Their bodies vanish into dust and ash if they set one foot out. However, if they find comfort, eventually some just… fade. Meanwhile, they rest.” Missy looks at him. “Isn’t that what we all deserve? Just… rest.”

They both inevitably flashback to the eternal dilemma. Do those who have suffered greatly have the capacity to heal enough to live peaceful lives after? Or will the suffering forever eclipse that peace, making them agonize in an eternal cycle? Is death the better solution for tortured minds?

The Master made his decision stand as the only possible solution back when he called himself that with feeling for the last time. He made it quickly, to shorten the suffering of a creature who had already withstood it too long. The Doctor had still hoped there was a better one. And he had been right, Missy thinks he had been right.

This is her solution now: comfort for the dead, long enough that one day they will reach true peace and become… something else. What the Time Lords were once seeking, aiming for, in the days of the War.

And Missy, the impossible reincarnation of a Time Lord born into carnage and destruction, has done it.

“So… he can’t…?” Clara mumbles.

Missy shakes her head.

“None of them can, love. He’s tried.”

Danny tells her, then. “They had to restrain me. I didn’t understand. She showed me the videos. Of people who had tried before me.”

No one has to speak aloud of the content of those. And why Danny is still here.

“I told him you’d come,” Missy says anyway. “I’ve been monitoring you. Helping you along. A little.”

“Can I come back?” Clara asks. “If he can’t ever leave, can I at least come back to see him?”

Her nose is runny.

“Sure you can,” Missy says. “Once you’ve already found this place, now he—” She points at the Doctor. “—can just take you here anytime. But… your friend really is dead, Clara. Eventually, he will fade. They all do. It’s just a matter of time.”

Missy and the Doctor share one glance. Even if it can be stalled, death ends up coming anyway, fully, at top speed. It comes and then it’s over. Missy has grown to learn how to make it peaceful for those involved. How to bring rest and repentance, how to bring respite. She’s not Missy, she’s _Mercy_.

Clara breathes out softly and hugs Danny as if it was truly the last time she was going to see him. Maybe hearing that one day it will be makes it so, somehow.

“Come with me now,” Missy tells the Doctor. “I want to show you something I think you’ll like.” The Doctor glances apprehensively at Clara. “Don’t worry, it’ll take but a moment.”

And, truthfully, they don’t have to walk very far. As it turns out, by the time he can smell flowers and hear the water fountain better than his own footsteps, Missy just flamboyantly opens the doors to the gardens. A few people have taken seats nearby, on iron benches by the walls, in the shade. Some, though, are playing in the sun, by the bushes of flowers, laughing.

“How did you come across this place?” the Doctor asks her.

“Oh, I’d been travelling for a while, here and there. The old me saw many things on my moral quest. You can laugh at that, by the way. I do.” She giggles. “But on my final trip, I happened to land here, precisely in this house—abandoned at the time, of course. I died last in the same place where I’m trying to give everybody else a taste of a second life. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Very,” the Doctor says, his face terribly serious.

“We’re actually somewhere in the English countryside,” Missy says. “Plenty of fresh air. If you walk out the main entrance, you can see for yourself. The cities in the horizon.”

He takes a look around him.

“I just…” she says, following his own gaze. “Fenced it a little, gave it perception shields, added extra space.”

“Then added the people.”

She nods. “That’s right.”

“How?”

“Very rudimentary homegrown Gallifreyan matrix main elements. You upload dying minds onto it… and well, if I brought the bodies along, voilà.” She sighs.

A momentary brush of pride washes over him at the sheer wit and skill required in order to make that work. Not to mention brawn as well for hauling people into a TARDIS, then into hotel rooms.

“You…” He clears his throat in such a manner that a nearby bird flies away. “You were always so predisposed for… ideas like that. Grand, almost beautiful, even. They’ve always looked very—er— _good_. On you. Especially now.”

She takes the compliment, blushing flirtily, and then goes on explaining.

“Their consciousness remains in the matrix room, aware, eternal and unalive. That’s why they break upon exit,” Missy continues. “But that’s a horror story I’d rather not share with the kids.”

“As if bodies turning to ash _wasn’t_ already a horror story…”

“What do you mean by that?” she says sternly. “It’s the only way to keep them inside the hotel.”

The Doctor holds Missy’s gaze now.

“You trap them here,” he says, without tensing his voice. He doesn’t mean it in a bad way. He learned a long time ago that there is no perfect solution to any problem. “To suffer indefinitely.”

“None of these people died natural deaths. Those souls pass on, I’ve tried to retrieve some myself, there’s nothing left. But… murders, accidents…”

“Mine,” the Doctor says, a little bit more softly, all of a sudden remembering the faces he’s seen in the corridors. “Yours.” 

“Not all of the old me died when I first came here, Doctor,” Missy says, smirking gently.

She guides him through the main part of the garden, under the sun and the clouds that barely keep it from shining strong, all the way to a secluded corner of it where a solitary person is sitting alone on a wooden bench. Even with their back turned a little to Missy and the Doctor, their profile is recognizable.

They’re wearing the same gray, ashen clothes they did on the day the Doctor had last seen them. Too long ago. This name, he could never remember because he never knew it. Their head is still practically hairless, the skin that they are showing pale and scaly, but looking healthier under the daylight than it ever did, back in the day.

“It’s the one thing I cannot change,” Missy explains softly to him. “They always stay as they did, when they died. I think it grounds them to who they were. Some never even change out of their clothes.”

The Doctor watches quietly for a while, his eyes getting teary.

“How long have they been here?”

“They were my first,” she confesses.

Missy turns a little to look at him. There are tears in her eyes as well, but she feels no shame in shedding them. She understands why he won’t. Too much time, too many people lost to it, to his own choices in safeguarding it. If things had been different, if she’d been there from the beginning, if they’d been together from the beginning, then maybe the Doctor wouldn’t be this Doctor, and maybe Missy wouldn’t be this Missy. They’d still be _them._ And they’d still feel compelled to cry at moments like this, which bind them more and more, even if they don’t want to realize it. She did, long ago. That’s why she’s here now. That’s why she found Clara, for him. For him to have _someone._

She was always bound to the Doctor. Not as the person to run after him, chasing impossible heroes or wanting to become them. She wasn’t a sidekick, either. She just remembered, one day. The old things those ancient Time Lords would say to them, in passing, chuckling like it mattered whether it was funny or not. _Master and Doctor, Doctor and Master_.

They’re the Last of the Time Lords.

One saves them from death.

One saves them _in_ death.

And this human, her first, was her first in so many ways. Their suffering was always going to take so very long to heal, but one only has to look now. If she and the Doctor sat next to them, a conversation would start. A smile would be born in their face. Not all is lost. One day, soon enough, this human who endured so much to save so many will be at peace. And Missy knows now that this time she has truly done something that the Doctor, her good Doctor, will look and marvel at.

“Why is it called 3W?” he asks after a while.

“I tell them all it’s because of Rest In Peace,” Missy says, delicately rubbing at the tears escaping her eyes. “But, you know… I prefer three other words.”

“Oh,” the Doctor says, suddenly wordless because of what’s implicit.

“Not those,” she says. “But almost. You could never say _those_ words, so I planned ahead.”

“What are they, then?” he says, pretending to be distracted. But she’s close enough, and they’re in tune. She knows his hearts aren’t precisely beating slow. And she knows why.

“ _There’s still time_ ,” she says. “Technically, that’s four words, but… technicalities and I don’t work. Never have.”

It surprises him as much as it does her to find that this… mess in his hearts is actually… relief. A calmness extending downward to the rest of him. There is, in fact, still time. There’s always been. Only now there’s more than that. Now, he and Missy have something else they’ve never had, not since Gallifrey. So he takes in a deep breath, waiting for the pounding in his chest to drown him, and faces the tidal wave that was always coming.

He reaches out for her hand, eyes lost in the human she once saved and now has saved again, and squeezes it. He holds that hand gently, slowly rubbing it with his thumb like he used to, too long ago, when they were children on a red rusty planet who didn’t know about their future and didn’t care, because they were free and weightless. And the Doctor smiles. For a moment, for this one deep breath, he feels just as free. Just as light. As happy.

Missy and him, right now… what they have is the chance to get all that _time_ back _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Does. Not. Compute.” Another _The Good Place_ Janet ref!
> 
> Here's the [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nGKBLdSNYNJNZc4tH8TQi) for this fic and its sequel! Thank you for reading!


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